


Death is Part of the Process, Part Four: All Breakages Must Be Paid For

by Licoriceallsorts



Series: Death is Part of the Process [4]
Category: Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, FFVII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-13
Updated: 2010-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 02:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 56,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/94530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Licoriceallsorts/pseuds/Licoriceallsorts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On with the story! The global economy relies on the Shinra Electric Company for its power, and Shinra is locked in a struggle to the death with the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE. Genesis has gone AWOL, Angeal is dead, and the President seems to have a screw loose; Zack broke Cissnei's heart when he dumped her for Aerith; Rude's lover has just betrayed him... but when duty calls, Turks must put their personal feelings aside. Also, there's a cat in the office that just won't go away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Unanswered Questions

**Author's Note:**

> In which the Turks go on the offensive in more ways than one, and Reno received an unexpected item in the mail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the Turks go on the offensive in more ways that one, and Reno received an unexpected item in the mail.

             The board meeting on the sixth of January was particularly lively. 

            Rude had, as a matter of course, reported what had taken place with Chelsy to Commander Veld, and Veld had, as a matter of duty, circulated among the Directors an edited account of the incident, from which all names had been deleted.  President Shinra, annoyed at being bilked of an identifiable scapegoat, was venting his irritation on Veld – but then, taking the flak was, as Reno might have said, what the Chief was for.

            “It’s been a year since AVALANCHE first made its presence felt, and you still haven’t given me anything useful. What are your Turks _doing?_” the Old Man demanded.

            “Aside from squashing bugs, flirting with the receptionists, and running up tabs at every cheap dive in town?” added Scarlett with a glint in her eye.

            Veld answered as calmly as he could, “I don’t think it’s fair to say we have achieved nothing this year. SOLDIER recruitment is at its highest level since that peak we hit just before the war. The Wuteng rebel bases inside Midgar have all been neutralised. In the past twelve months the quantity of free press hostile to Shinra has gone down by three quarters, and Sector 8 has only suffered four civilian casualties due to monsters. Right now, Shinra’s approval rating in the popular opinion polls stands at eighty-two percent. I think these are significant achievements.  It’s true we have not yet eliminated AVALANCHE, but we _have_ prevented them from doing any serious damage – “

            “The loss of my data disk,” interrupted Hojo. “Is that not serious?”

            Veld bent his head. “I concede the loss of the data disk. If Director Heidegger had allowed me to send more than one Turk to accompany Dr Rayleigh, it might not have happened – “

            “Don’t you start blaming me, you twisty bugger,” Heidegger grunted.

            Veld raised his eyebrows, and went on, “Genesis and Angeal have both been eliminated – “

            “By SOLDIER,” said Scarlet.

            Veld glanced across at Lazard. The SOLDIER Director had taken off his glasses and was rubbing his eyes. He looked washed out, exhausted. Beside him, Reeve Tuesti was doodling plans for slum regeneration projects: houses, sewers, plumbing, parks, and schools that would never, in any sense of the word, see the light of day.

            “By Administrative Research and SOLDIER working together,” Veld replied. “Hollander’s in custody in Junon and the stolen documents have been retrieved.  The attacks on the Sector 8 reactor and on Junon were both thwarted – “

            “By Sephiroth,” said the Old Man.

            Veld wanted to punch him then.

            The Commander had a thick skin. He could take anything that was thrown at him personally. Heidegger and Scarlett had been gunning for him for years; their enmity was to be expected.  And the President had always been capricious. To handle him one had to keep a cool head. 

            Through clenched teeth he replied, “You seem to forget, sir, that Reno and Aviva saved your life at least twice that day, at very considerable risk to their own –“

            “If you expect me to start being grateful to my employees for doing their jobs, then you’ve got another think coming.  You need to get your priorities straight.  AVALANCHE is the single biggest danger facing this company right now. We need information. We need answers.  And your department is not coming up with the goods.”

            “Sir, with all due respect, I resent the implication that we’re neglecting the AVALANCHE threat. Let me remind you that my entire staff here at head office numbers less than the First Classes in SOLDIER.  We’ve followed up every lead, no matter how tenuous. But we’re stretched to full capacity. My staff are working flat out. Nobody’s had a holiday for over a year.”

            “I don’t pay them to take holidays,” the Old Man snarled. “I pay for results. I want AVALANCHE stamped out. Now. Hire more Turks if you have to, Veld – “

             “Sir!” protested Scarlett and Heidegger together.   They were startled,  and Veld didn’t blame them; he hadn’t expected the argument to take this sudden turn in his favour either.

            The Old Man fixed them with his coldest stare. “I want it done,” he said.

            _This might be a vote of confidence_, thought Veld, though with the President one never knew. The Old Man’s tendency to make rash decisions on the spur of the moment was becoming more pronounced as he grew older.  Still, it was a result, and Veld would take what he could get right now.

            “Thank you, sir,” he said. “More staff will help. But you also need to remember that SOLDIER is in charge of what happens at the front. If we are to move effectively against AVALANCHE, we need their full cooperation.”

            “You have my cooperation,” said Lazard from the other end of the table. “Surely you know that?”

            He sounded tired. More than tired – bone-weary. Defeated.__

            “I think,” said their sixteen-year-old Vice-President, speaking for the first time during this meeting,“That Veld means the cooperation of the men under your so-called command.”

            “Rufus, that’s enough,” said the Old Man sharply.

            “But Father – oh, I’m sorry; I mean, Mr President - AVALANCHE is making a mockery of us.  Is this really the best we can do?  To shuffle blame around this table like a pack of cards?  If this is the way we do business, no wonder our enemies have the upper hand.”

            The Old Man bridled. “Do you have a problem with the way I run my company?”

             “Not a problem, no. But I have some questions. How is it that AVALANCHE are able to anticipate our every move?  How is it they always know where SOLDIER and the Turks are going to be? It seems blindingly obvious to me that they’re getting their information from somewhere – or someone. Well, Veld?”

            “Stop stirring it,” said Lazard. “We all know Veld is above suspicion.”

            “Speak for yourself,” snapped Scarlett.

            “No one’s above suspicion,” said Rufus smoothly. “Not even me. Or you.”

            “I damn well am,” said the Old Man. “And I make the decisions around here. Veld, I want you to find this leak and plug it. Do whatever it takes. I want results, and I want them soon. Or else.”

            “Understood,” said the Commander.

 

_13__th__ January 2002   _         

Reno reached into his pigeonhole and pulled out a pile of junk mail.  Coupons for a linens sale at Robsons… a brochure for a cruise line… an estate agent’s circular… the newsletter for the Red Leather fanclub. Several years ago he’d briefly hooked up with the then membership secretary, who’d put his name on the mailing list, and even though he’d never paid a sub in his life the monthly outpouring of infatuated trivia from the poncey dead git’s fan-ghouls continued to arrive in his box with depressing regularity.   

            He tossed the lot into the wastepaper bin, and was about to walk away, when out of the corner of his eye he realized that something stiff and shiny had fallen from between the pages of the newsletter. Doubling back, he reached into the bin and fished out a postcard.

            When he saw her handwriting, his heart began to beat a little faster. 

            _I guess nothing lasts forever_, she had written. _Not even my anger at you. When I first got here, I loved the solitude. Now I’m starting to feel lonely. I think that’s a good sign._

There was no signature, no return address, no postmark, no stamp.  He turned the card over.  The image on the front was a sepia-tinted photograph of the Sector Eight Clock Arch.

            Where in all the world was she? Tseng knew, but he wasn’t telling; Reno’s attempts to finagle a hint out of him had so far met with failure.  This reference to solitude was his first and only clue. It sounded like she was somewhere remote and uninhabited…. Yet wasn’t it true that often the loneliest place of all was in a crowd of strangers…?

            His phone rang.

            “What are you doing?” Rosalind demanded. “You should have relieved me twenty minutes ago. Come on, Reno – I covered for you a week ago and you still owe me.”

            “Be right there,” he promised, tucking the postcard into his jacket’s inside pocket.

            The previous seven days had been insanely busy: the Department had never known anything like it.  With the big push on to take fight into the enemy’s camp, the Turks were lucky to get half an hour’s sleep at a stretch, and even that had to be snatched while flying in helicopters, or sitting at their desks with their heads pillowed on stacks of printouts. Rosalind kept the coffee in the kitchen hot and strong.

            Reno personally felt that a little electric shock therapy would have done wonders for the old fraud’s powers of recall. Unfortunately, they were under orders to handle him with kid gloves. Bugenhagen had a lot of friends in all sorts of places. Shame.

            Back in Midgar, he and Rude combed through the routine intelligence reports filed by the company’s branch offices and military outposts; they tapped deep into the department’s informal network of stool pigeons, the paid informants and the private detectives Veld kept on retainer; they questioned every one of the scientists involved, however insignificantly, in the SOLDIER enhancement program, on the off-chance that someone might be hiding something. So far, they’d come up with zip.

            For an organization that seemed to be pretty substantial, AVALANCHE was good at covering its tracks.  On the 48th floor of the Shinra building, tempers were growing short.  The Turks were not used to being outsmarted.

            With a mug of black coffee in his hand, and Cissnei’s postcard on his mind, Reno went to the surveillance room on the floor between floors, where Rosalind had spent the last six hours scanning radio frequencies in search of possible AVALANCHE transmissions.  “My head’s _killing_ me,” she snapped, yanking off the headphones and throwing them at him.  “I’m going to go close my eyes for an hour. If Tseng calls, tell him I’m dead.”

*

            Tseng, meanwhile, was in Costa del Sol, standing on the porch of a lemon coloured villa. The window shutters had been painted a dark blue since the last time he was here, and terracotta pots filled with scarlet and white geraniums had been placed either side of the front door. The heat was intense, and he had walked up from the harbour; sweat trickled between his shoulder blades. He wiped his face with a handkerchief, and rang the bell.

            The Legendary Turk answered the door dressed in surfing trunks, a hooded cotton pullover, sunglasses, and flip-flops. His thick, reddish-blond hair had grown to touch his collar, and he sported a pair of sideburns along the line of his jaw.  There was a gun in his hand; old habits died hard. When he saw Tseng, he stuffed the gun into his waistband and grinned in a way that was as much wolfish as friendly.  “Come in, kiddo.”

            They walked through to the patio. On the way Tseng caught a glimpse through a half-closed door of a dark-skinned girl asleep on a bed. Out on the patio were a hammock and a pair of striped deck-chairs. Rather reluctantly, Tseng folded himself into one of these. Charlie offered him a sherry on the rocks. Tseng declined. Charlie poured himself a large one and stretched out in the hammock. Beyond the shade of the patio’s thatch stretched a private yellow beach, and then the rolling blue surf.

            “As prisons go,” Tseng said, “This is tolerable, I suppose.”

            He was merely making conversation. The day was headache-inducingly bright.  Tseng was always relieved when the time came to leave Costa and return to the subtle half-tones of Midgar. Charlie sipped his drink, saying nothing. Tseng decided to get straight to the point.

            “Someone’s leaking information to AVALANCHE. From the top.”

            “No kidding.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “It had to be something. You and Veld never drop by for no reason, just to say hello.”

            “I can’t speak for the Commander,” said Tseng, “But personally, I have a hard time seeing you like this.”

            Charlie laughed. “Happy, you mean?”

            “Does living like this make you happy?”

            “It beats working. So… Information leak, eh? Don’t know anything about it. Sorry. Is that all you came to ask? Or was that just your way of leading up to another little chat about me returning to work? Because if it was, don’t bother.”

            Tseng watched the surf ebb and flow while he turned over various replies in his mind. Charlie rocked the hammock with one foot, and sipped on his drink.

            Tseng said, “We need you, Charlie. That’s obvious. But I think you need us more. You’re fading away in the sun here.  No one talks about you much any more. The new Turks don’t even know your name. You’re ancient history.  In ten year’s time you’ll be propping up the bar at the Del Sol and buying strangers drinks so they’ll hang around long enough to listen to your stories. If that makes you happy, fine.”

            Charlie swung the hammock back and forth for a while, saying nothing.  Tseng held his peace.  The loudest sound was the chink of the ice in Charlie’s glass.

            “Could you do me a favour, Tseng?” said Charlie at last.  “Tell Veld to send one of his cute young girl recruits next time. That way I can have something to feast my eye on while I’m busy not listening. Now, don’t let me keep you.  You can find your own way out.”

            Tseng left, having done what he came to do. The conversation had gone pretty much as he expected. The Legend’s pride was his weakness, but it was also their opportunity. Now they would have to wait and see.

*

            Three hours later the dial of the radio scanner was still slowly working its way through the frequencies, and the successive bands of atmospheric crackle had become so much white noise in Reno’s ears. For the twentieth time, he had taken out Cissnei’s postcard and was re-reading it.

            _I guess nothing lasts forever, not even my anger against you…_

Well, at least he was no longer her public enemy number one. But what else was included in _nothing_? What was she hinting at? How else had her feelings changed?

            …_Now I’m starting to feel lonely. I think that’s a good sign._

What was that supposed to mean? Lonely in general? Lonely for someone in particular? Why was that good? Good for who -?  

            “Are you all right there?” asked Rosalind from the doorway.

            Quickly he slipped the postcard back into his pocket. Rosalind appeared not to have seen it; she came in and set a fresh mug of coffee beside his elbow.

            “You look better,” he said.

            “I feel better.  I can take over now, if you want.”

            Just then it occurred to Reno that he might be acting like an complete idiot, reading far too much into a simple postcard. For all he knew, Cissnei had sent postcards to everyone in the office, and had confided to them all that she was feeling a bit lonesome...

            “Hey, Roz,” he asked as casually as he could, “D’you ever hear from Ciss?”

            Rosalind shook her head. “Not a word. But I don’t expect to. She – “

A high pitched-whine flooded his ears, drowning Roz out.  Reno clamped both hands to the headphones.

            “What is it?” she cried.

            “Hang on! Sssh!”

            They both held their breath. The whine became a hum, dropped in pitch, and resolved into the distinct cadences of a human voice rising and falling.

            “I’ve got something,” he told her.

 “What are they saying?” she asked him.

            “It’s too garbled – I can’t make it out.”

            “What's their location? Let me see – “ Rosalind pushed round his chair to take a look at the dial.  “It’s a non-allocated frequency, all right,” she agreed.

            Reno flipped a switch to lock into the wavelength.  Both of them turned their eyes to the map on the screen, where a green circle was rapidly zooming in on the Northern Continent, coming to rest at last on a spot about thirty kilometers north of Icicle Inn.

 “It’s them,” she breathed.

            “Roz, don’t we have a base there?”

            “Not that far north. And not on that frequency. It’s them. It’s AVALANCHE. It has to be.” Flushed with triumph, Rosalind threw her arms around Reno’s neck and planted a kiss on his cheek.  “You,” she laughed, “Are bloody brilliant.”

*

              “You’re sure this is AVALANCHE headquarters?” said Lazard to Commander Veld an hour later.

            They were standing side by side in Lazard’s office, studying the map of the Northern Continent that was flickering on his wall monitor.  Veld’s answer was curt. “We can’t be sure of anything until we check it out. But the odds are good.”

            “Who are you sending?”

            “Knox and Reno.”

            Lazard inclined his head. “I’ll brief my men and have them stand by. Our base is about fifteen kliks to the south. Here -” he indicated the position with one long, gloved finger.

            Of all the many things about Lazard that got up Veld’s nose, those white linen gloves irked him the most.  They were more than an affectation. Like the emails stuffed full of double-meanings that Lazard circulated from time to time, they were an exercise in hypocrisy.  If the bastard didn’t want to get his hands dirty, why had he accepted this Directorship?  If he disapproved of the way his father did business, why didn’t he resign? Instead, he sat on the fence, enjoying all the benefits of being a Shinra executive while badmouthing the company to its employees in the slyest possible way – and that, in Veld’s eyes, was the act of a coward.

            That the Old Man had chosen to give his illegitimate son command of SOLDIER was an error of judgement for which, Veld was sure, the company had not yet finished paying, not by a long chalk. He’d advised against it, and suggested something harmless like HR or Marketing, but the Old Man would have his own way.

            The Old Man felt guilty about Lazard. Veld saw no reason why he should.  Though he had left Lazard’s mother in order to marry the young society beauty who would eventually die giving birth to Rufus, it had never been his intention to abandon his older son.  Lazard’s mother was the one who had chosen to disappear into the slums, taking their child with her, and for eight years Veld had sought her in vain.  Finally he had come across her by accident in a charity clinic in Sector Two; she was slurring her words like an alcoholic, though the doctors said it was a degenerative disease.  Lazard, by then aged twelve, had had no idea who his father was, and the Old Man had been happy to leave it that way: his young wife was having difficulties conceiving, and the last thing he needed was a scandal that might tear apart the already fragile harmony of his domestic life.

            Lazard’s mother had been put in a nursing home, and the boy had gone to boarding school, where he did well.  Then there had been the internship at the bank, followed by the move to Shinra, and the rapid ascent up the corporate ladder that had set tongues wagging.  Lazard’s relationship to the Old Man, though never officially acknowledged, was now an open secret.  Lazard himself did not speak of it in public, or, as far as Veld could discover, in private either. With Cissnei he had never referred to the Old Man as anything other than _The President._

Perhaps he liked to pretend to himself that he had risen so far on his own merits.  But if all he was guilty of was self-deception… well, who wasn’t? Incompetence and cowardice did not, on their own, constitute treachery.  Lazard was weak. He was embittered. But according to Cissnei, he was also a man whose principles ran deep. Did he really have the nerve, or the desire, to be a traitor?

            Veld asked him, “What kind of force do we have up there?”

            “Two platoons of troopers. A dozen Thirds. And two Seconds  – Essai Yevtushenko and Sebastian Bold.”

            “That’s a lot of manpower for a monster hunting mission,” Veld observed.

            Though his tone had been neutral, the implication was inescapable. Lazard’s body tensed. _Guilt?_ wondered the Turk. Certainly Lazard seemed to have been taken by surprise.  It took him several moments to put together a response.

            “Commander Veld,” he said at last, “You are a man whom I respect. I think I’ve made that clear these last few years. So please, do me the favour of being straight with me. Do you suspect me of leaking information to AVALANCHE?”

            “I suspect everyone,” Veld replied.

            “Guilty until proven innocent. Is that how it works?” 

            Veld made a noise that was partly a chuckle, partly a grunt acknowledging Lazard was right. “Everyone is guilty of something,” he told him, “In my experience, at least.”

*

            Next morning, after seeing Knox and Reno off, the Commander returned from the rooftop helipad to find the Director of SOLDIER pacing back and forth in his office. Lazard’s face was ashen. Without any preamble, he said, “We’ve lost radio contact with the base.”

            It was bad news, and yet…. Veld realized he wasn’t surprised.

            “Phones?” he asked.

            “They’re ringing. No one’s answering.” Lazard paused.

            “What about your Seconds?”

            “We’ve been unable to get in touch with them.”

            “What?” Veld could not keep the disbelief out of his voice. “_Both_ of them?”

            Lazard closed his eyes with an air of resigned helplessness, and nodded. Veld grabbed him and shook him. “Don’t go to sleep, man! When did this happen?”

            “Just now.”

            “Bloody hell.” Veld ground his teeth. “Someone tipped them off.”

            “So it would appear. Commander, listen – I’m aware of what this makes me sound like, but if I were you I’d call my men back. You don’t know what they’re flying into.”

            Veld treated this suggestion with the contempt it deserved.  Turning his back on Lazard, he took out his phone and made two calls: the first to Tseng, to brief him, and the second over the radio link to Knox. “Re-route to Icicle Inn and proceed by chocobo,” he ordered. “The first priority is to avoid detection. Find out what happened at the base, and report to Tseng.” 

            Snapping the phone shut, he headed for the door.

            “Where are you going?” Lazard asked.

            “To inform the President.”

            “Shall I come with you?”

            Veld looked him up and down and said, “No.”

            Five minutes later he walked into the penthouse on the 70th floor. The Old Man was busy working at his desk, while Rufus lay stretched out on the floor underneath the window, reading a comic, his golden head pillowed against Dark Nation’s purple flank. The boy had had a growth spurt in the last year, and had recently taken to wearing oddly-cut assymetrical suits in layers of black and white; Veld supposed it must be the fashion amongst teenagers these days. 

            The Old Man looked up.  “Veld? What’s happened?”

            All the President’s hopes for a swift and final end to the AVALANCHE crisis were riding on this mission.  He was, as Veld well knew, an irrepressible optimist. He had always been the one with the vision; the job of those around him was to make that vision happen. The likelihood of setbacks, the possibility of failure, never seriously entered into his calculations. In the President’s imagination, AVALANCHE had already been brought to their knees. 

            His anger at the news thus took the form of righteous indignation, as if he had been robbed of something that belonged to him, or cheated out of a prize that he had won fair and square. Picking up a carved ashtray, he hurled it at the window – but the glass was bullet proof, and the ashtray fell to the floor, cracking the marble tile.

            “_Two_ Second Classes!” he cried. “How? It’s impossible. Who betrayed us, Veld? Who?”

            Rufus, unperturbed, turned the page of his comic.

            “I don’t know,” Veld admitted.

            “Why the hell don’t you know? I told you to plug that leak!”

            “What do you want me to do? Put the entire Board under arrest?”

            The Old Man’s fist clenched around a paperweight. “Damn it, Veld, my Board can’t be the only suspects.”

            “Who else has access to that kind of information?”

            “What about your Turks?”

            “Don’t be stupid, Father,” Rufus interrupted, laying his comic aside. “The Turks have more to lose than anybody if this company goes under.”

            “Goes under?” the Old Man sputtered. “What are you talking about? You think a bunch of crazy vermin could bring down this company? We have what the world wants, Rufus. We _are_ what the world wants. Who the hell wants AVALANCHE?  In fact….” The Old Man hesitated. A sly smile lightened his face. “If you look at it another way, the lousy scum have done us a favour.”

            “What do you mean?” asked his son.

            “Everyone knows the man on the Sector Eight omnibus is an ungrateful bastard -“

            “The who?” Rufus interrupted.

            “It’s a saying,” Veld explained. “The man in the street. Joe Public.”

            “People are quick to forget what they owe us,” the President went on. “They take the good times for granted.  But when AVALANCHE threatens us, it makes people think. What would their lives be like without Shinra? Where would they be? Back in the bad old days, that’s where.”

            Rufus looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying a little terrorism is good for P.R.?”

            “I’m saying that they served a purpose they didn’t intend.  But they’ve worn out their welcome.  They’re starting to make us look weak. It’s time we got rid of them once and for all.  Since we’ve lost the element of surprise we’ll have to settle with AVALANCHE first, and deal with our mole later. Veld, I want to launch an immediate assault. Liaise with Heidegger and Lazard.”

             “We can’t attack if we don’t know what we’re facing. Let my men finish their recce -”

            “They can reconnoitre while Lazard and Heidegger muster the troops. You’ve got twenty-four hours. And tell Lazard to get Sephiroth on the case.”

            “Sephiroth’s on another mission,” said Veld. “With Zack Fair.”

            “All right then, leave Sephiroth where he is. Pull Zack, and put him in charge of this assignment. It’ll be a good opportunity to see what he’s made of.”

            “I think it’s Hojo,” said Rufus.

            The two old men turned to look at him. “What?” said his father.

            “If you were to ask me who is the least loyal director on the Board, I’d say Hojo.  He’s a shark. He follows the smell of blood.  Plus he’s a hack. The only useful thing he’s ever done for this company was the development of the mako enhancement procedure, and even that was mostly Gast’s work. I think the mole is Hojo.”

           Rufus' father looked a little taken aback, but only for a moment. Then he laughed indulgently,  “Hojo has everything he wants right here.  He’s the last man who would betray us.  Just read your comic, Rufus, and leave business to the men who understand it.”

_* _

_ PHS Transcript, 14 January 2002, 21.56 pm _

_Knox: Survey completed, sir._

_Tseng: What did you find?_

_Knox: It’s AVALANCHE, all right, and it’s big. Could be their H.Q. They’ve dug in under the ice. It’s almost impossible to see from the outside. _

_Tseng: What do you put their strength at?_

_Knox: Maybe several hundred men? And monsters – Guard Hounds and Grand Horns._

_Tseng: Did you have any trouble?_

_Knox: Nothing we couldn’t handle. _

_Tseng: Are you back at the base now?_

_Knox: Yes. It’s not ideal, but we have to have shelter. We’ve posted lookouts. Most of our men were only knocked out. They’re back on their feet now. _

_Tseng: What about the two SOLDIERs?_

_Knox: AVALANCHE took them._

_&lt;static&gt;_

_Tseng: Are they dead?_

_Knox: No. We found them. They were being held in tanks filled with some sort of dark liquid. Reno and I freed them. They seem to be OK._

_Tseng: Tanks? Like cloning tanks?_

_Knox: Apparently AVALANCHE use the tanks to regenerate their Ravens._

_Tseng: The Ravens…._

_Knox: I’ve counted four so far. They seem to be almost indestructible. I fought one in the tank room and thought I’d killed it, but when we got outside, it had regenerated. The AVALANCHE guy with the glasses – Fuhito – said it was defective. He killed it with a mako gun. _

_Tseng: Are they human?_

_Knox: Hard to tell. I think maybe they were once, sir…_

            Tanks? Liquids? Human experiments? Monsters that could not die? Reading the transcript, Veld turned these vivid images over in his mind, and was troubled by the possibilities they suggested.  The ‘Ravens’ sounded like Hojo’s kind of operation.  AVALANCHE had stolen Hojo’s disk, true… But the data on the disk had been about something different. And in any case, AVALANCHE had used Ravens to steal the disk, so they must have known how to make those black operatives since well before last July. Where had they learnt the technique? Who had shown it to them?

            Could it be that Rufus was right?

            Was Hojo breaking loose from his gilded cage?

 

 


	2. Beneath the Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno and Zack go on a mission together

The thermometer read twenty-seven degrees below zero. Despite their ichthyornis-down jackets and fur-lined boots, the troopers were freezing. The SOLDIERs had too much mako in their veins, and the Turks had taken too much materia, to feel the cold, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get frostbite like everyone else. The essential thing was to keep moving.

            “Where the hell is Zack?” demanded Reno.

            They found him asleep in the back of a truck. He woke up laughing, and not at all apologetic. 

            But when he walked out in front of the troopers and the Second and Third classes, a change took place.  The men stood up straighter, looked more alert. A positive energy charged the atmosphere.  They were ready to follow where Zack led; they were ready and willing to fight.

            Knox turned to Reno and said, “There’s a man Shinra can’t afford to lose.”  He got a grunt in reply.

            They moved out in a convoy of trucks.  The danger point would be the bridge ten kilometers ahead, a bottleneck over a steep crevasse.  About a kilometer before the bridge, the convoy came under attack from guard hounds. Zack leapt from the truck and killed the first wave of animals, wielding Angeal’s impossibly huge sword as easily if it were made of balsa wood.  More hounds appeared. The two Second Classes and the Turks joined the fight, and gradually it came about that Knox, Essai and Sebastian cleared the way in front of the convoy, while Zack and Reno guarded it from behind. In this manner they battled their way to the bridge.  The trucks crossed safely, and Zack and Reno were bringing up the rear, when, without warning, the uprights splintered and gave way. The bridge came apart beneath their feet, and they fell, SOLDIER and Turk, into the depths of the crevasse.

*

            “We’ve lost contact,” said Veld to the President.

            “With Zack?”

            “With everyone.”

            “Not looking good,” said Rufus. 

*

            _What a strange light_, thought Reno dreamily as he opened his eyes. _Kind of dusky blue, almost night, with flickering shadows and spots of brightness. Like being deep beneath the sea. But I’m not. Am I?_

Far, far above him a crack of sunshine glittered. The air that filled his lungs was chilly and damp.  Sheer rock walls, encrusted with black ice, loomed over him on every side.  Reno realized that his clothes felt wet, and after another moment saw that he was lying in a deep pile of snow. Rubbing his head, he sat up and looked around.

            So. Now it was starting to come back to him: Northern Continent. Avalanche attack. Broken bridge. Long fall into deep canyon, and no way out… except, maybe, that cave there -

            “You OK?” asked a voice he knew well.

            _Oh no,_ thought Reno, _no, no, no…._

Zack’s face swooped into focus, peering intently at Reno with every appearance of concern. The effect was like having a blue flashlight shone into his eyes at point blank range: it _hurt_. Reno rolled away from the SOLDIER’s inquisitive gaze and got to his feet, blinking. Spots danced across his field of vision.  “Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his hand over the back of his head and feeling an egg-sized bump coming up.

            This couldn’t be happening. Maybe he was having a hallucination. Yeah – that must be it. He’d hit his head and now he was dreaming he was trapped in an icy crevasse on the Northern Continent with Zack Fair, of all people.  It was like the worst kind of materia-induced nightmare.  Reno screwed his eyes shut and willed himself to wake up.

            “That was some fall,” said Zack. “You must be pretty tough, huh?”

            Reno cracked open one eye and glared at him. “Yeah, you think?”

            “Hey!” Zack threw his hands in the air. ”Don’t look at me.  I didn’t do anything. The trucks must have weakened the bridge. It was probably pretty old. At least there’s no bones broken.”

            Reno dug into his pocket and took out his phone.

            “What are you doing?” asked Zack.

            “Calling HQ.”

            Zack laughed. “No signal down here, man.”

            By sheer effort of will Reno managed to hide his dismay as he put the useless phone away. He’d never been out of contact with HQ before, never been unable to ask the Chief or Tseng what he ought to do next. It felt like his umbilical cord had been cut.  To calm himself, he went through the routine of checking his weapons. Both his guns were intact. Good. God only knew what monsters they might encounter down in these uncharted regions. He still had all his materia. Good. The mag-rod had not been broken in the fall. Good.  If they couldn’t find a route out of here, he could use the materia and the rod to melt a path through the ice. Though there was always the danger of a cave-in if he tried that -

            “You’re a walking arsenal, aren’t you?” said Zack, in a tone of mingled admiration and surprise. “I never knew.  For a long time I thought you guys were just the dirty tricks brigade.  But you can really fight, can’t you?”

            _Just let it roll off you,_ Reno told himself. The priority was to complete the mission, by whatever means necessary, even if that now meant partnering up with Zack Fair.

            Meanwhile, Zack had turned round and walked a little way into the mouth of the cave. “Hey, Reno,” he called out, sounding excited. “Come look at this.”

            Reno was following anyway; there was no other possible way out of the crevasse.  _God, _he thought_, what’s the hick getting so amped about now?_  - but when he came up behind Zack’s shoulder and looked into the cave he could not help catching his breath.  The place was like the inside of a crystal ball, a bubble of glass blown into the glacier and shot through with shimmering rainbows. Beneath their feet the ice was clear blue, smooth as glass; the fractures in the ice shone like frozen lightning bolts, reflecting and magnifying what little light there was. Thousands, or even tens of thousands of icicles hung from the ceiling; Reno couldn’t begin to count them all.  A low-pitched groaning came and went all around them, combined with a crackling, tinkling sound like chandeliers rustling in the breeze.  It was one of the most beautiful things Reno had ever seen – and the eeriest.

            Zack was murmuring to himself, “Wish I could show this to her …“ He turned to Reno with a big grin on his face. “Man,” he said, “It’s times like these I remember why being in SOLDIER is the best job in the world. Isn’t this place something else? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s completely unspoilt. Makes me wonder – are we the first human beings ever to set eyes on it?”

            “Yeah, we’re lucky bunnies,” said Reno. “Now let’s go.”

            Zack looked at him as if he couldn’t believe that anyone, even a Turk, could remain so unmoved in the face of such a breathtaking natural phenomenon. But all he said was, “Yeah… You’re right, we should start getting back. Which way?”

            “That way,” Reno jerked his head to the left.

            “Are you sure? How do you know?”

            “Fresh air. Colder air. Smell it? It comes from the surface.”

            Zack sniffed. His heightened SOLDIER senses picked up the scent of a way out. He smiled and nodded. “You lead. I’ll follow.”

            They had gone perhaps a dozen steps when Reno heard, high above his head, a sharp grating sound like the neck of a wine-glass snapping. He stepped aside, and a split-second later the falling icicle hit the spot where he had been standing. It was so sharp and so hard that it landed without breaking and buried itself six inches deep in the ice.

            “Close one,” said Zack; adding, perhaps unnecessarily, “If that had hit you, it would’ve killed you.”

            The vibrations from his voice broke loose the icicle above his own head. Snatching Angeal’s sword from his back, he shattered the icicle with a single blow. Reno ducked to avoid the flying fragments.  Shards of ice struck other icicles, triggering a chain reaction; all around them the glassy spears showered down, smashing and crashing with a noise like a ten-car pile up. Reno crouched low, protecting his head with his arms.

            Silence fell. He looked up. Zack’s head and shoulders were covered with a layer of  ice chips; Reno supposed he must look the same. Cold meltwater was beginning to trickle down his neck. For about ten meters in every direction, every single icicle had fallen from the ceiling - but beyond, there were hundreds and hundreds more, hanging on a hair’s trigger, ready to drop at the slightest sound.

            He and Zack looked questioningly at each other.

            _Run?_ mouthed Zack.

            Reno hesitated, then nodded.

            They sprinted across the slippery floor, with Reno in the lead zig-zagging around the icicles as they fell, and Zack following behind, slashing and hacking. Their mad breathless dash took less than a minute, and then they were safe on the other side of the cave.

            “Oh yeah!” Zack crowed, twirling his sword, as the final echoes of breaking ice died away. “It sure is fun out here in snow country!”

            Reno too felt pumped, exhilarated – alive! – but he’d be damned if he’d share this feeling, or any, with Zack Fair. So he mentally stamped on the flames of his delight, and turned away to seek along the wall for the source of the fresh air.

            He found a tunnel slanting upwards, slippery and smooth.

            “Big enough?” asked Zack.

            “Seems to be.”

            “Looks like we’re getting out of here, then. Good thing these boots have traction. How about you? No wait, don’t tell me. You’ve got special Turk boots, right? Bet you can walk upside down on ceilings. The human fly!”

            _If we don’t escape before we run out of food,_ _I guess I can always eat him._ Reno took some comfort in this thought.

The tunnel was steep, and the climb was hard work. In several places the shaft became almost vertical, and the two men were forced to brace against each other’s backs, elbows locked together, to walk up the walls slow step by step. Finally they heaved themselves over the lip of the tunnel, and found they were in another, smaller cave.

            “Good teamwork,” said Zack.  “Thanks. I couldn’t have made it on my own.” He leant back against the ice wall, folding his arms behind his head. “How about we take a breather, OK?”

            Reno looked at his PHS.  “It’s been over an hour. We should keep moving.”

            “There’s no hurry.  Essai and Sebastian’ll be fine on their own. They can handle just about anything.”

            “They friends of yours?”

            “I’ve been on a couple of missions with them. But that’s all it takes to becomes friends with someone, isn’t it?  And they’ve got my hometown boy Knox to back them up. He’s no slouch either - for a Turk, I mean,” Zack chuckled. Reno, seeing nothing to laugh about, did not.  Zack grinned and pointed a finger at him. “Come on, Reno, lighten up. You know I’m just pulling your leg. Those three’ll have everything under control, so stop worrying. Relax. Take a load off.”

            Realising that they were going to have a break whether he wanted one or not, Reno sat down on an outcropping of ice and lit a cigarette.

             “Hey, Reno – are you hungry? All this work is giving me an appetite. Let’s see what I’ve got.” Zack rummaged through the pockets of his baggy trousers and eventually produced some hard SOLDIER tack wrapped in a ziploc bag.  “If you suck it slowly, it won’t break your teeth. Want some?”

            “No. Thanks.”

            “Suit yourself.” Zack broke off a piece and put it in his mouth. Almost immediately he began talking again. “So… how long have you been a Turk, Reno?”

            _God_, thought Reno, _please, anything but small talk. _

“Well?” Zack prodded.

            “Seven years,” Reno admitted.

            “Seven years? You must have started young. And it’s good? You like it?”

            This felt like a strange question to Reno, though he couldn’t put his finger on why, precisely. It was a bit like asking him if he enjoyed breathing; if it felt nice to have a skin. So he replied, “I’m good _at_ it.”

            “That’s what I’ve heard. Seph told me what you did at Junon last year.  But -” Zack shifted his weight, leaned forward. “Here’s the thing I can’t figure out. There seems to be a lot of overlap between Turks and SOLDIER.  I mean in duties and stuff. Seems kind of inefficient. So what is it you guys _do_, exactly? I mean, what’s your job description?”

            Reno gave him the stock answer: “We protect company secrets.”

            “Company secrets,” Zack frowned. “There’s a lot of those, aren’t there?”

            Reno said nothing, but his heavy-lidded eyes never shifted their focus away from the SOLDIER’s face.

            After a moment or two, Zack laughed. “OK. I get the message. Still. I bet _your_ job is never boring.”

            “Don’t put your shirt on it.”

            “Yeah? I guess it’s the same no matter what job you do. I get bored sometimes. Being in SOLDIER isn’t always what I thought it would be. When I joined up, I thought it’d be non-stop action. But I pretty much missed out on the war. Angeal took me on some clean-up missions, but that was really just training.  You know what I hate most? Sitting around in Midgar doing nothing. If it weren’t for…. well, sometimes I feel I might just go crazy, waiting.  Midgar kind of weighs down on you, don’t you feel that? Those clouds and that sick light; it’s just not natural.  I can’t stay there for too long. I have to get back out where the sky is blue.”

            Reno blew a smoke ring. Why was Zack telling him all this? Did he honestly think Reno was interested?  What was he trying to do? Find some common ground between them? Make _friends_?

            “Cissnei says you like to fly helicopters, so I guess you crave the blue too.”

            No accidental slip, that: Zack had mentioned her deliberately - and so casually, as if they’d been no more than friends; as if he hadn’t first won her and taken her, and then dumped her and seen her exiled to a remote and unnamed loneliness.

            Zack said, “She told me you grew up in the slums.  So you probably never saw the sky as a kid, did you?”

            The thought that they had made him the subject of their pillow talk was almost beyond bearing.  Reno couldn’t look at Zack’s face another moment. He turned his head away.

            Zack went on, “I mean, I get a thrill whenever I see it and I grew up taking it for granted, so I can’t imagine what it must feel like seeing the sky for the first time. Someone – some people who grow up in the slums find the sky pretty scary. And then to go from that to flying in it!  Amazing. Man, I wish I could fly a chopper. It’s one thing SOLDIER doesn’t do.”

            “They don’t fucking shut up, either, do they?” said Reno, goaded into speaking at last.

            The silence that followed went on, and on.

            _Fuck it_, thought Reno, _what’s with this guy? He knows I don’t like him. He must have some idea _why_ I don’t like him. And now he’s acting like I hurt his feelings or something. Well, he’ll just have to be satisfied with being loved by the rest of the whole goddamn friggin’ world, because I’m not buying it._

             Finally, Zack nodded, a curt, businesslike inclination of the head, and stood up, brushing the snow from his backside.  “OK, then,” he said. “I guess we better get moving.”

            On they trudged through the ice caves, Zack in front, Reno behind. Neither spoke now. The only sound was the crunch of their boots on the snow. One cavern led to another, always upwards. As the air grew fresher, colder, drier, their breath made clouds in front of their faces.  Each man was lost in his own thoughts.

            Reno’s thoughts were not pleasant ones. He was struggling against a kaleidoscope of images: imagined scenes of Zack and Cissnei getting creative in the sack, which refused to leave him no matter how hard he pushed them away; the memory of Cissnei’s face glowing with happiness as she danced in Zack’s arms; that same face blotchy with tears and contorted in fury, turning on him, Reno, to cry, _I’ve just lost the love of my life…._

And who was he thinking of, the black-haired SOLDIER striding on ahead? It didn’t take a genius to guess -

            _Hey, Zack, you want to know a company secret?_ _How about this? We watched you screw the primary objective. That’s right.  You popped her petal.  You crushed her dear little flowers. It’s all in the files, man. We can read it any time. Dates, times, places. But you don’t know she’s an endangered species, do you? You don’t know how fucking lucky you are that the Boss hasn’t broken your neck, messing with stuff you know nothing about – _

These ugly reflections were shattered by the sound of growling, loud and too close behind them. Reno whirled round. Four guard hounds stood in the mouth of the cavern from which he and Zack had just emerged. Blue fur bristling, tails lashing, the four beasts snapped their long fangs together, working up the courage to charge.

            “Out of the way!” Zack cried.

            “Back off!” Reno warned him. His EMR was already in his hand, and with a flick of the switch he cast a bolt over all four of the creatures.

            It wasn’t a quick or pretty way to die.  The electricity fizzed and the animals writhed painfully, sparks of fire running through their fur and bursting out of their ears, their mouths, their anuses. Eyes popped; bones shattered; hides shriveled and peeled away from burnt flesh; and then, at last, they vaporized, and nothing was left of them but the stink of burnt hair and a little blackish sludge, pooling in the hole that had been melted into the cave’s icy floor.

            Zack did not bother to hide his disgust. “_That’s_ your weapon of choice?”

            Reno laid the rod across his shoulder. “They’re just monsters. And there’s probably more of them coming, so let’s keep moving.”

            They set off again, Reno in the lead.  From behind his back he could hear Zack mutter, “Just what I’d have expected from a Turk….” Which was fine by Reno; more than fine. Better than pretending to be friends, for sure.

            They had not been walking ten minutes when two more guard hounds came upon them, from the front this time. “Mine!” cried Zack, pushing Reno aside and dashing forward. He drew Angeal’s sword. The animals held their ground, snarling.

            “Go on, then,” said Reno.

            Still Zack hesitated.

            One of the guard hounds coiled back on its haunches and sprang, teeth bared, at Zack’s throat. Reno just had time to think, _if I let that valuable corporate asset die down here the Chief will kill me! – _before Zack let out a shout that nearly split his eardrums.

In fact it was less of a shout than a roar, a burst of pure noise ululating from Zack’s throat. Reno dropped the EMR and covered his ears. The two guard hounds instantly fell onto their sides, tails tucked tightly between their legs, exposing themselves to Zack in abject submission.

            “What the hell was that?” Reno demanded. His ears were still ringing.

            “My dad’s old trick. I’m a farm boy, remember?” Zack knelt down beside the hounds and scratched their freckled bellies. They thumped their tails in thanks.  One licked his hand. “Hey, fellas, hey,” Zack soothed them. “Good dogs. Go on now. Go home. Good boys. Go home.”

            Obediently, the two hounds got to their feet and trotted off in the direction they had come.

            “Nice job,” said Reno. “They can snack on us later, yo.”

            “There’s been enough killing for one day,” said Zack. “I’m not going to kill anything unless I have to.”

            Reno was beginning to feel he’d had about as much as he could take from this SOLDIER. It was on the tip of his tongue to snap out a sarcastic reply, to pick a quarrel, and maybe even a fight – but suddenly, unbidden, a memory of Cissnei flashed into his mind’s eye.  In the dim light of the train graveyard her face was smeared with blood and dirt, and there were tears gathering in her eyes.

            _I hate wasting life for no reason, Reno. I hate it!_

            He’d saved a little cat that day. Just because he could.

            He’d done it to make her happy.

Such a small life, a cat’s life. But he’d felt good about it, too.  Good about himself –

            “We’re nearly there,” said Zack. “See the light? Come on, let’s hurry.”

            When they came out into the daylight, snow was softly falling. The world was completely soundless. Looking around, they saw that they were not far along the road from the broken bridge.  The convoy had passed this way, leaving the trail of its tires in the snow. The two men turned their eyes northwards, where an ominous column of smoke could be seen rising beyond a line of rocky hills.  Without a word, Zack and Reno began to run towards it.

_*_

_ PHS Transcript, 15th January 2002 _

_Veld: Reno?  Are you all right? What’s happening?_

_Reno: There’s been an ambush, sir. The troopers here have all been knocked out. Knox is unconscious. _

_Veld: What? What about SOLDIER? _

_Reno: The second classes aren’t here. Looks like they’ve been abducted. Again._

_Veld: But what about Zack?_

_Reno: He’s gone after them, sir._

_&lt;static&gt;_

_Veld: Follow him, Reno. Whatever happens, AVALANCHE mustn’t get their hands on him._

_Reno: Understood. Reno out. _

            Veld sat on, deep in thought, the phone lying open in his hand.  He would have liked to close his eyes, to lay his head down on the desk and sleep, sleep, sleep as he hadn’t slept in days.  He was being outmaneuvered, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop it.

            Through every step of this failed operation, someone had been passing information to AVALANCHE. That someone, it was clear, was a member of the Board. But who? Heidegger? Scarlett? Unlikely. They’d spent their lives building Shinra. Surely they’d never sell it out to its enemies. Hojo? Some of the evidence pointed in his direction, but what could he possibly stand to gain from destroying Shinra? Lazard? He was almost too patently a suspect, and yet not, for that reason, to be dismissed out of hand….

            People were dying because he, Veld, couldn’t find the answer. Who would be next? His own boys and girls? Tseng? The Turks’ second-in-command would be an obvious target…

            There was no point in deferring the inevitable any longer.  Rising to his feet, Veld headed for the elevator. The President was waiting to be informed. 


	3. We Can't All Be Heroes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno reflects on the events in Icicle Inn, Mozo makes an unnerving suggestion, and Tseng worries about Zack's future.

            “So then what happened?” Cavour asked Reno.

            It was the evening of the following day, that hour when the drinks-after-work crowd crossed paths with the drinks-before-showtime crowd. The Goblins Bar was bursting at the seams, customers spilling out onto the sidewalk with glasses in their hands, but even so the manager had cleared the Turks’ favourite table for them. The boys and girls in the blue serge suits liked to sit in the snug at the back of the saloon bar, close to the fireplace, where the dark red carpet, the lacquered wood paneling, and the soft lamplight combined to create an atmosphere of womblike cosiness. By longstanding Turk tradition, the last man in from a mission stood everyone else the first round, and tonight that man was Reno. The helicopter from Icicle Inn had landed on the rooftop pad less than two hours ago; Zack had immediately gone to report to Lazard, while stretcher-bearers had carried Knox to the infirmary on the 34th floor, where the doctors had examined his fractured skull and assured an anxious Tseng that he would make a full recovery, though his left cheek would be badly scarred. Meanwhile the Chief had debriefed Reno and sent him to write his report. That job done, Reno’s colleagues had borne him away to the Goblins, to celebrate his safe return from out of the frozen jaws of AVALANCHE. 

            “After the Chief told you to follow Zack Fair,” Cavour prompted. “What happened then?”

            Pared of embellishments and interruptions, the tale Reno told them went as follows: Taking the short cut over the hills, he’d arrived at the AVALANCHE base to find it deserted, except for a few Grand Horns ambling aimlessly along the corridors. Avoiding them, he’d made his way to the capsule room – the room where, the day before, he and Knox had freed Essai and Sebastian from the giant test-tubes in which they’d been trapped. Reno didn’t expect to find them in the capsule room a second time. In fact, he’d assumed they were dead. But when he walked in, there they were, floating in two transparent cylinders of black slime.  Had they been abandoned in haste when AVALANCHE fled? Or were the tanks booby-trapped as a parting gift?  Reno wasn’t taking any chances. Withdrawing to the cover of the doorway, he used his gun to shoot the locks on the capsules. The lids flew open, the slime gushed out, and the two SOLDIERS flopped onto the floor like fish tipped out of a fish tank.  Reno knelt down beside them to see if they were still breathing.  He was bending over them, pressing an ear to one of their hearts, when they attacked him.

            They didn’t recognize him. They didn’t know their own names.  Their faces had changed, too; had become blandly identical. Which one had been Essai, and which one Sebastian, Reno couldn’t tell. They had lost the ability to speak. All that remained of the men they had once been were the second class uniforms they wore. 

            After a hard struggle, Reno managed to break free and ran for the doorway, intending to shoot them from a safe distance. At that moment Zack burst in. _Stay back_, he called to Reno, _I don’t want anyone to get hurt._

Essai and Sebastian – or, to be accurate, the things now living inside Essai and Sebastian’s skins – made a lunge for Zack. _They’re monsters, _Reno warned him. _They’ll kill you. _

_            No, they aren’t! They won’t!_ Zack shouted back.

            He began to call their names over and over, gently, as if he were trying to wake up a child. _ Sebastian. Essai. My friends. It’s me, Zack. It’s OK, Essai. I’m here now, Sebastian. It’s OK._

And they woke up, and knew him, and thanked him, and lay down and died.

            “We lost them?” exclaimed Rosalind. “Both of them?”

            “But they were SOLDIERs!” said Skeeter disbelievingly.  It had long been an article of faith in Shinra that the only thing capable of killing a SOLDIER was another SOLDIER.

            Mozo put his hand over his eyes.

            All of the Turks sitting around the table had known Essai and Sebastian. Some of them had been on missions with the two dead men. They’d eaten meals together round campfires, crawled through Midgar’s sewers, hiked across rope-bridges in the far south-west; they’d ridden chocobos with them through the Grasslands, or won money from them at cards, or traded good-natured boasts and insults … And all that time, while Essai and Sebastian were getting on with the business of living, this terrible end had been lying in wait for them, coming closer day by day…

            “They’re better off dead,” said Reno, sounding as serious as anyone had ever heard him be. “Whatever process it is they got going on in those tubes, I don’t think it can be reversed. Zack tried, and it killed them. They were dead the moment AVALANCHE got their hands on them.”

            “That’s something worth bearing in mind,” said Mozo, “For all of us.”

             Each of the Turks sat in silence for a moment, considering Mozo’s words. 

            It would have been impossible to do their job for any length of time and remain ignorant of what was meant by a fate worse than death.  Tseng had instructed them in how to avoid such a fate; he had shown them where to put the gun against their own heads, the correct spot and angle to ensure that the shot was clean, painless, and final. But which of them had ever dreamt that such desperate measures might one day be required? To get killed in the line of duty – that was one thing. Each of them was prepared for that. To be pushed into the kind of corner where your best option was to put a bullet through your own brain, that was…. Well, it was what Turks did to the enemies of Shinra. Now, with Essai and Sebastian, AVALANCHE had turned the tables, and Mozo seemed to be suggesting that the same fate could befall any of them, if they weren’t careful.

            It was the first time anyone had even hinted at the possibility that AVALANCHE might be too strong for Shinra.

            “But why are they doing this? What do they want? That’s what we still don’t know,” said Rosalind.

            “Death to the Shinra,” Reno mocked.

            Rosalind frowned at him. “Genesis I understood, sort of. The Wuteng, I can see why they hate us. But what have we ever done to these people in AVALANCHE?”

            Aviva slammed her fist on the table, startling everyone. “They’re just evil! They like to hurt people!  They want to take this company down and destroy all the progress we’ve made, and they don’t care how many innocent people they kill!  We can’t let them win! Come on, guys, cut it out with the long faces. You’re looking like a bunch of losers.”

            “She’s right,” Rude added, his gaze moving slowly around the table.

            Those two words were the first he had spoken all evening.  Aviva shot him a look of warm gratitude.

            _Hmm_, thought Reno.

            These last few weeks, since the catastrophe of Chelsy, Rude had been talking less and less, to the point where Reno had begun to fear he might stop speaking altogether.  It made a kind of sense, when you thought about it. What was there to say, after all?

            The spying bitch had said she loved him, and then she’d turned around and walked out of his life. What must that feel like, to be loved by somebody who’d set out to use you? To hold onto her only as long as she didn’t love you, and then have her run out on you when she did? Reno couldn’t imagine: he’d never stuck around with anyone long enough to be loved _or_ dumped. Was it good or bad to know that she was still walking around in the world somewhere, breathing the same air as you, feeling the same sun on her face?  Reno liked to think of Cissnei that way sometimes, when he was lying up on the roof watching the night clouds boil and wondering if, wherever she was, she too was gazing up into the sky and thinking…

            But who would she be thinking of? Who was she lonely for?

            “… It’s just not possible,” Cavour was protesting. “Shinra’s megalithic. How big can AVALANCHE be?”

            “They don’t need to be big if they have the technology, and from the sounds of it, they do,” said Mozo.

            “But where do they get their funding?” Cavour persisted. “Wutai, maybe?”

            “Wutai haven’t got the money to pay for their own reconstruction, let alone fund a terrorist organization,” put in Rosalind.

            “The reactor building program is supposed to stimulate the Wuteng economy,” Mozo pointed out.  “But it’s possible the money’s being siphoned off. A little creative accounting works wonders. We should be looking into that. In the meantime, they just hold out their hands for our aid. Nice little earner, eh? Get paid for losing a war. Hey, Reno, are you asleep? I’m getting another round in.  Feed the kitty.”

            “Same again,” said Reno. He handed the money to Mozo, pushed his chair back and stood up. “I'm going to take a leak. ”

*

            Up on the 48th floor, Tseng paced restlessly, unable to settle himself to any useful occupation. He and the Commander had been reading through Reno’s report, such as it was, when a phone call had come through summoning Veld to the penthouse.  “Looks like this is it,” said Veld, getting to his feet.  Tseng had opened his mouth to ask to come with him, but Veld forestalled the question. “No. You’d better wait here.”

            It seemed to Tseng that he was destined, in every crisis of his life, to be alone. Ten years ago he had been pacing this same empty office in just this way, watching the hands of the clock as they moved slowly from second to second, each tick breaking a silence that felt infinite as he waited for Veld to return from the brink of disaster.

            How could the President hold Veld to blame for what had happened up North? Heidegger and Scarlet were equally responsible, if not more so; they’d been  pouring their poison into the Old Man’s ear, turning him against the Commander, but what had they done to help solve the problem? Nothing – which meant, of course, that they’d avoided the taint of failure.

            Yet the mission to the Northern Continent hadn’t been a complete disaster.  AVALANCHE had managed to pull out safely, it was true, but they’d lost their base and all their equipment, which was no small setback. Their activities would be curtailed for some time to come, time the Turks could use to track down their new hiding place.  Reno had also managed to bring back a sample of the slime Fuhito used to create the black Ravens.  Hojo’s scientists had already run an initial analysis, and the results had confirmed that the substance was mostly unrefined mako, contaminated by some as yet unidentified agent.  This was more or less what Tseng had expected. Essai and Sebastian had been hollowed out, pithed, their selves almost erased. Immersion in pure mako alone could not do this, not in such a short time. A mako bath enhanced a man’s strength and speed and senses, but it did not strip him of his humanity, his soul.

            Even in the ugliest throes of his transformation, Angeal had remained true to himself, and had claimed the right to freedom of choice, though the only choice left to him, by then, was the manner of his death.

            Even when he was a monster, Angeal had still been a man.

            One could argue the distinctions further, Tseng reflected. One could say that Hollander, like most scientists, hadn’t really known what he was doing. Working from a base of imperfectly understood information and wrong assumptions, his experiments had been, at worst, committed out of curiosity, the desire to see what would happen if Cell X were injected here and Cell Y implanted there.  At best, one could even claim that his actions had been motivated by a perverted desire to advance the human cause. 

             But would someone like Zack be able to grasp these distinctions? To him, the evil that befell Essai and Sebastian must have seemed like Angeal’s fate all over again. It hadn’t escaped Tseng’s notice that this time around Zack had refused to fight.  He’d even spared the lives of the guard hounds.  Some men did reach a saturation point, when they were no longer able to bear the weight of another death on their conscience.  Tseng hoped, for Zack’s sake, that he would not turn out to be one of these. Such men had no future in SOLDIER.

            Life, individual life, was not important. No Turk would have done what Zack did. Turks did not indulge their feelings at the expense of the mission. Hadn’t he, Tseng, once abandoned his own Commander to what he’d thought was certain death, in order to fulfill his duty? Every time he looked into Veld’s face and saw the scars left by that day’s action - the scars Veld wore with such pride - Tseng was reminded that he had found the strength to obey against every instinct of his heart’s prompting.  He had been well trained, indeed.

            Yet Veld himself had broken the commandments that day -  

            Tseng’s phone rang. “Sir?” he answered.

           “It’s as we feared,” said Veld. “Call the others and get them back up here. I don’t want them to hear it from anyone but me.”           

*

            _The men’s toilets in the Goblins Bar seems as good a place as any to take a look in the mirror. So go on, Reno, why don’t you?_

_            Be honest. There’ve been times, this last year, when you thought you were the man. Weren’t there? Those heroics in Junon. Saving the little kitty. Staring death in the face on the runaway elevator and blowing it off with a laugh. _

_            Look at your badass self. Look, can’t you?_

_            That story you told them back there. Who was the hero? Not you, Reno, no matter how you slice it. You just did your job._

_            Zack’s the man. _

_             You still don’t like him. So whose problem is that?_

_            Hey, but we are what we are, yo. Can’t do anything about it – got to play the hand we’re dealt, and all. You’re good at what you do, damn good. Sephiroth himself said it. Even the Boss has to admit it. So why should you care that Zack’s the hero? Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to take nothing seriously?_

_            That face in the mirror’s coming a little too sharply into focus.  Time for another drink now, don’t you think, Reno? _

            Rude was waiting for him outside the bathroom door.  His tawny face looked more solemn than usual. “What’s up?” asked Reno, taking the cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it.

            “Tseng called. He wants us back at the office.  The others have gone ahead.”

            “What’s happened?”

            “He wouldn’t say.”

            “But it’s bad, you think?”

            “Shit.” Reno took a long, deep drag, exhaled slowly, then threw the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his heel. “Like we need any more crap right now. All right, partner. Let’s go.”


	4. Heidegger Takes Charge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Turks must come to terms with a change of command, and Aviva is rescued by a tall handsome stranger.

            Veld had been relieved of his command.

            The Turks were stunned. They’d been expecting some kind of disciplinary action over their failure to find and silence the leak, but this was crazy; this was too extreme. To cut off their collective head, and hang it, metaphorically speaking, like a trophy from a boardroom battle! Was the Old Man going senile?

            Veld broke the news and then left quickly, advising them (since it was no longer his right to give orders) that they should all get some rest: they were expected back at work tomorrow morning, same as usual. But nobody could think of sleeping.  By common consent they retreated to the lounge area to discuss their situation and see if they could find some ray of hope.  Reno dragged the beer crate in from the kitchen; Rosalind put the coffee on.

            “What’s going to happen to Commander Veld now?” asked Aviva. “I mean – he _lives _here. Will he have to leave, sir?”

            She put the question to Tseng, who was standing by the window, arms folded, his weight thrown onto his back leg, looking as perfectly in control as he always did. The Turks were glad of his presence. Having him with them was a reassurance that their world had not been turned completely upside-down.

            “He hasn’t been sacked,” Tseng explained. “He’s still on the Board. The President’s keeping him on in an advisory capacity. He’ll stay in his office. But he no longer has clearance to be on this floor or involve himself in our work in any way.”

            “Well, that sucks,” said Skeeter. “Aren’t we even allowed to _see_ him?”

            Rosalind sighed. “How will we manage without him?”

            “Are you taking command of us now, sir?” Cavour asked Tseng.

            “For the interim,” he replied, “Until one of the other Directors is given responsibility for this department.”

            “Who?” asked Aviva.

            “Lazard would make sense,” said Rosalind.

            Tseng shook his head. “I doubt it will be Lazard.”

            “But who then? God – not Scarlett – “

            “Talk about a choice of evils,” said Reno.

            “We don’t know, so it’s pointless to speculate,” said Tseng firmly. “You are working yourselves up for nothing. In any case, whoever it is, we will do what it takes to forge a successful working relationship with him, or her. It’s what Commander Veld would expect.  We’re still his Turks,” Tseng’s voice softened a little, “And whatever we do reflects on him. Let’s give him reasons to be proud of us.”

            “Or he’ll have our skins when he comes back,” said Mozo, making them all laugh. Aviva said wistfully, “Oh, do you think he will come back, really?”

            Mozo nodded. “I’ll bet you anything. The Board want to give him a good slap on the wrist. But nobody can run this department like he can, and the Old Man knows it. He’ll be back inside of a week, you mark my words.”

            The Turks were not allowed to grasp this shiny wire of hope for long.  Next morning, as they sat listless and bleary-eyed at their desks, the door hissed open and Director Heidegger came in, accompanied by four of his blue-uniformed troopers and followed by an expressionless Tseng. The Director was looking extremely pleased with himself; his little eyes glinted like the black bead eyes of a stuffed toy,  and his beard seemed bristlier than ever. At the sight of him, every Turk heart sank.

             Little Aviva in particular shrank back, ducking her head. Rude quietly rolled his own chair forward to conceal her from view.  But the blizzara he’d slipped into Heidegger’s whiskey must have done the trick, for though the Director paused before speaking to take a good took round the room, he gave no sign that he recognised her.

            “Attention, Turks,” Heidegger boomed. “You’ve been nothing but a pain in the arse since the day Veld hired you, but starting today that’s all going to change. I’m in charge now, and I’ll see to it that you make yourselves useful.  Tell me, what’s my title?”

            “Don’t you know it, sir?” asked Reno, his face innocently bland.

            From across the room Tseng shot him a warning look.

            “Stupid Turk! That was a rhetorical question. Director of Public Safety Maintenance, that’s who I am. _Public Safety_. Shinra’s top priority.  Don’t any of you forget it.  And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a soft touch like your old boss –“

            From across the room came a strangled cough.

            “Tseng!” barked Heidegger.

            “Just clearing my throat, sir.”

            “Three of you are missing. Where are they?”

            “Knox is in the infirmary. He was injured in the recent action against AVALANCHE. Mink’s at the branch office in Junon, working on Turk recruitment. Skeeter’s on patrol in Sector 8.”

            “Recall him. Sector 8 is no longer Turks’ jurisdiction. My army will be keeping the peace in _all_ of Midgar from now on. And get the woman back here.  I’m not wasting money recruiting more Turks. There’s too many of you as it is.” Heidegger paused.  “Knox can stay where he is, for now.  As for the rest of you, I’ll let you know your orders as soon as I can think of some use for you good-for-nothing lot. That’s all.”

            Heidegger about-faced and strutted from the room, chuckling to himself. The four grunts followed. The door slid shut.

            “Prat,” said Mozo.

            Aviva had covered her mouth with her hands, shaking her head and muttering, “Oh, god, oh, god, oh….” 

            “Was that for real?” asked Rosalind, “Or did I just dream it?”

            Rude reached over and laid a gentle hand on Aviva’s shoulder. “It’s OK,” he said.

            Leaning forward in his chair, Reno stared across at Tseng, who was studying the pattern of the floor tiles in a calmly thoughtful kind of way. Reno searched that impassive Wuteng face for some hint of what was going on inside, but Tseng, as ever, was unreadable.  You might have thought he didn’t give a damn, yet Reno knew that wasn’t true. Frustrated, he exclaimed, “Boss, are you just going to stand there and take that shit?”

            Tseng was a long time answering; so long, in fact, that Reno was beginning to think he hadn’t heard the question, and was about to repeat it, when Tseng lifted his head and said in his coldest voice, “You shouldn’t have provoked him. It was inappropriate and foolish. Fortunately for you, our new Director is somewhat… obtuse. Don’t do it again.”

            “But the man’s an insult – “

            “He’s our Director. We will show him all due respect.”

            “I’m not taking orders from Heidegger. He fucking hates us. He wants to cut us out of all the important stuff. You heard him. He’s going to have us stuffing envelopes and rescuing old ladies’ cats from now till the day we die, and he’ll be rubbing our noses in it the whole time.  What crap kind of way is that to reward our loyalty?”

            “Calm down,” said Rude.

            “No, I fucking won’t. People have died in this department protecting Shinra. Nats died. Remember? Knox nearly died two days ago.  We all have scars. We get the job done and we don’t expect thanks, but I’ll tell you what I do expect – I expect the Old Man to have a bit more respect for what we do for him than to replace our Chief with a twat like Heidegger_ – _“

            “Reno,” said Tseng, “Shut up.”

            At the sound of those words, anger took hold of Reno completely. He had been through so much in the last few days, and now to be silenced by Tseng when all he’d done was voice aloud what they were all thinking – it was the last straw.

            He stood up.  “That’s it,” he said. Tearing the goggles from his head, he threw them onto the desk.  “The rest of you can lie down and take this crap if you want. But I quit.”

            He was already heading for the door; he couldn’t see their faces. He could hear Rosalind, though: she was tittering in a slightly panicked way. Why was she laughing? Did she think he was joking?

            “You can’t quit,” said Tseng calmly.

            “Oh yeah? Watch me.”

            The force of his anger carried Reno out the door and halfway to the elevators before cooler reason began to reassert itself. Was he actually going to go through with this?  Ride down that elevator, go through those front doors, walk down those steps, turn his back on all of this forever? 

            His hasty footsteps slowed their pace. Where was he planning to go, exactly?  Where could he go? What would he do? Beyond these walls, without this suit, who would he be? Who, in the world outside Shinra, gave a shit about him? Without Rude, without Mozo and Knox, without Roz and Veev -  without Tseng, damn him, and the Commander, he was nobody, and he had nobody. This job was his life.  Was he really going to throw it all away because of _Heidegger?_

Reno stood still for a moment, thinking.

            If he left, how would Cissnei know where to find him?

            Anyway, he didn’t have much money in his pockets, only twenty or thirty gil, and half a pack of cigarettes.  That wouldn’t get him very far. Maybe the best thing would be to go up to the 64th floor and run on the treadmill for a while, until he’d calmed down enough to think clearly –

            “Having second thoughts about your grand gesture?” said Tseng from close behind.

            Reno turned round. Tseng was holding his goggles out to him. But Reno wasn’t ready to roll over just yet. He made no move to take them.

            “Maybe,” he said. “And maybe not.”

            The ghost of a smile touched Tseng’s lips. “Don’t let me stop you.”

            “Don’t give me that. You wouldn’t just let me leave. Would you?”

            “How far do you think you’d get? Our enemies are everywhere and you are - conspicuous. Midgar’s full of people with a grudge against Shinra who would love to take a pot-shot at an ex-Turk. Without that suit to protect you, you’d be dead by the end of the week.”

            “Yeah – well, maybe I’ll do a Charlie. Switch sides, join AVALANCHE and kick Heidegger’s butt.”

            “A tempting prospect,” Tseng agreed, which was quite an admission, coming from him.  “And I’m sure they’ll be happy to prepare a test tube just for you.“

            “All right, all right,” sighed Reno. “I get the point.”

            “I don’t think you do. My point is not simply that you need us. We need you. _I_ need you, now more than ever. I understand why you’re angry, and I don’t like the situation either, but we have no choice.  We’ve been deliberately made to look incompetent.”

            Reno’s ears pricked up. “Deliberately? You mean, set up?”

            “The information leak. Don’t you see? It’s aimed at us. Someone at the top wants us out of the way, or at least rendered ineffective.”

            “You think it’s Heidegger?”

            “We still don’t know. Whoever it is, though, they have us where they want us now, and if you walked out on us you’d be playing into their hands.  Our only hope is to stick together. The Commander’s taken the blame for our failure on himself in order to keep the department intact. He’s put his faith in our ability to cope without him. I intend to make sure that we all get through this together, intact, so that when the Commander comes back – and he _will_ come back – he has a team to return to.”

            “Well now,” said Reno, “That’s a chocobo of a whole different colour.  There was I thinking the Old Man was treating us like crap ‘coz he despises us, and now you’re telling me the whole thing’s a conspiracy by our enemies to destroy us.  You know what, Boss? If you’d shared that with me in the first place, you could have saved me from making an ass of myself back there.”

            “You’d only have found some other way.  Let’s hope you’ve got it out of your system now. Could you take these things?” Tseng held up the goggles.  “You look strange without them.”

            Reno snapped the goggles into place. The familiar pressure of their elastic strap felt good, felt right, around his head – like he was himself again.

            “The Chief has a plan, right?” he said to Tseng. “To get us out of this mess?”

            “He may.”

            Reno grinned. “So he doesn’t tell you everything?”

            “I certainly don’t tell _you_ everything,” Tseng shot back. “Now get back to work, Reno. You’ve wasted enough time this morning.

*

            Reno’s return to the office was welcomed by a chorus of delight.

            “Reno!” cried Skeeter. “Thank God!”

            “You came back!” Aviva jumped out of her chair.

            “You sure had us going there for a minute,” Mozo grinned.

            “Piss artist,” laughed Rosalind. “When you threw those goggles down, I thought you really meant it.”

            Reno looked across at Rude, who was saying nothing. He didn’t need to voice his thoughts aloud; Reno could see in his face that they were thinking the same thing: _It’s not just because we have nowhere else to go. It’s because there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. _

Rude had never doubted for an instant that his partner would be back.

“Aw, give me a break, you chumps,” laughed Reno, rolling his greeny-blue eyes at them.  “I was just winding Tseng up.”

*

            Later that afternoon, Reno found another postcard in his pigeonhole. This one had a picture of Sephiroth posing in front of the historic Nibelheim reactor.  She must have bought a set of the things before she’d left Midgar. As with the previous card, there was nothing to indicate where it had been posted. Presumably it had come through the internal mail.

            On the back she’d written:  _I often wonder if Tseng is getting anywhere with the Legend.  Without Charlie and Nats the family feels broken. I’ve never got to know the rookies.  It’s like you’ve all moved on without me. Am I the black sheep now? Please don’t forget me. _

            Meanwhile, in Tseng’s office, Rufus was saying, “I’m sorry about Veld. Really, I am.”

            Tseng was unmoved. “You were at the meeting yesterday, he told me.”

            “I was, but – “

            “He said you were the one egging the President on to dismiss him.”

            Tseng was sitting behind his open laptop, having been interrupted in the middle of reading his emails.  Dark Nation lay against the closed door, purring. Rufus had been looking out the window, but when Tseng made the accusation, he turned round to defend himself.

            “Do you think I wanted to say those things?” he exclaimed. “I have to follow the script I’m given, the same as everyone else. Whenever my father has to make an unpopular decision, he likes to make it look as if someone else has talked him into it.  That way he always has a fall guy to blame.  You know what a devious bastard he is.”

            _Like father, like son_, thought Tseng. Although it was perfectly possible that what Rufus was saying was true.

            Rufus went on, “The one good thing about having Heidegger appointed to replace Veld is that he’s guaranteed to make a mess of it.  He’s an out-and-out military man; he doesn’t understand the first thing about running an organization like the Turks. It won’t be long before he shoots himself in the foot, and then my father will see he’s made a mistake and reinstate Veld.  It would have been worse if he’d assigned someone who might actually make a half-decent job of directing this department. Someone like Scarlet, for instance. Or – “

            A sudden thought, the suggestion of a probability, crossed Tseng’s mind. “Did you think it would be you?” he asked.

            _Bull’s-eye._ Rufus stammered, faltered, and fell silent. A dark blush spread across his face, right to the roots of his hair. Tseng was surprised to see it. He hadn’t thought it possible ever to put this boy out of countenance.

            He said, “If you grow up to be half the man Commander Veld is, you might just be fit for the post, some day. Don’t try to run before you can walk.”

            “Actually,” said Rufus, cheeks still burning, “I was expecting my father to appoint _you_.”

            “I would not presume to step into the Commander’s shoes.  Now, as you can see, I’m very busy – “

            “Can’t I stay here? If you’re using your laptop I could work on your other computer.”

            “Work?” Tseng raised an eyebrow.

            “I’ve written a new hack program. I want to see if I can break into the First Midgar bank site. I know you’ve already got a program that does that, but I want to try to do it myself.  I promise not to disturb you.”

            Something about the boy made it hard to say no.  Maybe it was because Rufus was so impatient to grow up and _do_ something; Tseng could sympathize with that. By the time he was Rufus’ age, he’d already been working as a Turk for three years. Or maybe it was simply because Rufus’ attempts to impress him flattered his ego, reminding him of his own younger self, hungry for Veld’s approval. 

            In any case, wasn’t it better that Rufus remain here under Tseng’s watchful eye, than be off making trouble somewhere else?

            “All right,” said Tseng. “If you work quietly.”

            Rufus settled himself at the console; Tseng returned to his emails and tried to concentrate.  He did not really like having other people in his space when he was working, and the sound of Rufus’s fingernails clicking as they flew over the keys was distracting him.  The boy typed very fast. He was sitting straight up in his chair, not slouching as most people did; his elbows were tucked in neatly and his head was slightly inclined, his fair hair falling over his forehead. In his pristine white suit, with his polished shoes and his pearl cufflinks, he was the very epitome of gilded youth.

            Looking at him made Tseng feel old.  When had the soft-cheeked child in the sailor suit, peering in fascination down the barrel of Tseng’s gun, become this lanky, elegant adolescent?  Yet there were some things about Rufus that never changed. His determination to have his own way - and his beauty; yes, even Aerith, as a child, had found Rufus’ beauty irresistible. Where did those good looks come from?  Lazard’s long face was intelligent rather than handsome, and as for the Old Man – surely he had never been much to look at, even before age and the corruption of power had robbed him of whatever charms he’d once possessed.  Tseng had not known Rufus’ mother, who had died when her son was born, but according to Veld she had been lovely, so presumably it was from her that he’d inherited that silky hair and petal skin, those refined features, those cobalt blue eyes.

            _Do I have a weakness for beautiful things?_ Tseng wondered. _Is that why I put up with him? There’s little enough in the way of beauty to be found round here, god knows…_

 

*        

 

            On the fifteenth day of his reign as Head of the Department of Administrative Research, Director Heidegger received a warning from the Military Academy’s intelligence unit of suspicious activity in the Junon area.  He immediately put every available Turk into one helicopter (disregarding Veld’s ironclad rule of no more than three Turks to a chopper, lest half the department be lost in a single accident) and shipped them down to Junon with vague orders to split up, patrol the city, and report any concerns to him immediately. This, as Reno was not slow to point out, was the kind of work any sharp-eyed child of ten could do.

            Tseng did not seriously expect trouble, and he doubted whether Heidegger did, either. These rumours were merely an excuse to get the Turks out of Midgar. Barely a fortnight had passed since the destruction of AVALANCHE’S northern base. They could not possibly have regrouped in such a short space of time.

            So he thought. But he could not have been more wrong.

            AVALANCHE launched their attack with precision timing, advancing into Junon from every side in numbers that defied all probability.  Tseng’s phone was jammed with incoming calls: Aviva at the harbour, Reno in lower Junon, Rude in upper Junon, Mozo by the submarine docks, Cavour at the airport, all of them simultaneously asking for help that he could not provide.  Within minutes the situation had turned desperate. 

            Swallowing his pride, Tseng dialed Heidegger’s number.

            Their new Director had promised he would send in his army at the first sign of trouble. That would have been bad enough – the last thing poor beleaguered Junon needed was another pitched battle running through its streets. But when Tseng called for help, Heidegger’s response was to do nothing.  His troops sat tight in their fortified barracks, watching through their windows while Junon was overrun – waiting, on Heidegger’s orders, for every last Turk to be exterminated. That must be the truth of the matter, Tseng now realized. No other explanation made sense.

            It was all coming clear to him. Heidegger was the one who had set them up.  He was the leak, the mole, the enemy.  Reno had had the right idea: get out while the going was good. But he, Tseng, had talked him out of it. What a fool he’d been! Why had he summoned Skeeter back from Sector 8 on that morning when Heidegger took charge? Why hadn’t he told the boy to find somewhere to hide? And Mink – he could have warned her. He could have said, _run, run anywhere, but don’t come back to Midgar. _ But what had he done? He’d obeyed their new Director, and ordered her home.  Heidegger’s accomplice, that’s who he’d been.

            He had been given leadership, and he had led his team astray.

            In desperation he dialed Veld’s number.

            _“_We’re all going to die here!” he shouted down the phone. “Help us!”

 He hadn’t heard from Rude or Rosalind for over twenty minutes, and believed they were both already dead.

            “What do you think I can do?” demanded Veld. “Don’t do this to me.” Before Tseng could speak again, he hung up.

            Tseng tried calling the others, but they didn’t answer. If they were still alive, their hands were full. He was on his own. Staying alive was the priority now; Tseng wanted desperately, passionately, by any means, to live, so that he could get back to Midgar and kill Heidegger with his own hands.

            Coming upon a lone AVALANCHE operative who had unwisely ventured up a dark alley, Tseng snapped his neck, put on his uniform, and took his weapons.  Then he tacked himself on to the tail end of an enemy unit heading up towards the airport.  In this way he managed to pass through three roadblocks, and was coming to the service lift when he felt his phone vibrate.  Looking both ways to make sure that nobody was watching, he nipped in through the door of the nearest house, and found himself in somebody’s living room.  Four terrified pairs of eyes stared at him over the back of a sofa.

            “There’s no cause for alarm,” Tseng told them as he took out his phone. “I’m with Shinra.”

            “That’s reassuring,” muttered one of the pairs of eyes.

            “Tseng?” said the voice at the other end of the line, the voice he’d longed above all others to hear.

            “Commander!”

            “That’s right. I’m back in charge. President’s orders. Now listen closely, here’s what I want you to do…

            Nor was this the only white rabbit their magician of a Commander pulled out of his miracle hat that day.  Aviva, having thrown her last knife and used all her materia, was running for her life when she rounded a corner of the harbour wall and came face to face with a tall stranger in a dark blue zippered suit who was, without doubt, the coolest person she had ever set eyes on in her entire life, even counting Reno. He had long reddish-blond hair, thick sideburns, and dark sunglasses, and he was standing quite still in the midst of all the chaos, chewing ruminatively on a smouldering cigar. In one hand he held what looked like a chain of small grenades strung along a fuse. Raising the end of the fuse to his cigar, he lit it; then he took the cigar out of his mouth and smiled at her, “Hey, cutie. Are you on my team?”

            Breathless, she nodded.  “They’re right - behind me -”

            Three AVALANCHE operatives came pelting round the corner, saw the stranger, and stopped.

            “Present for you,” he said, tossing the string of grenades in their direction. Then he grabbed Aviva’s hand and told her, “Run!”

            They didn’t quite get far enough. The force of the blast threw Aviva onto her face, skinning her chin, rupturing her spleen, and fracturing her right femur in two places.  Gobbets of AVALANCHE flesh showered down on her.  “Ah, sweet,” said her saviour.

            He bent over her and pushed her hair back to look at her face. She heard him say, “Is the old boy snatching them out of the cradle?”

            “My leg’s broken,” Aviva groaned.

            A hail of bullets fell around them. “Can’t stop now,” he told her. He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder; the pain was so intense she screamed.  He spat out the cigar, and with his teeth pulled the pin from another grenade, throwing it forward to clear a path and diving for cover behind an empty cargo container. At this point Aviva realised she was about to pass out.  But first -

            “Who _are_ you?” she gasped.

            “Some people call me the Legend,” he said. “But you, doll-face, can call me Charlie.”

*

            Whatever it was that Commander Veld said or did to make the President change his mind, the Turks never found out. He didn’t tell them, and they, of course, didn’t ask. Tseng waited to be told (he did not presume to _expect_) but Veld’s silence on the subject was absolute.  It was as if he’d never been away.

            Charlie was more forthcoming.  “He begged me,” he told Tseng. “He said if I didn’t get over to Junon and save your skins, you’d all die. Never thought I’d hear the old boy grovel like that to anyone. He was practically weeping. Finally I had to say yes just to make him stop.  So then he said, ‘Go outside’, and I went outside, and what did I see? A chopper, coming down to get me.  He must have sent it for me at least an hour before he picked up the phone.”

            They were sitting together in one of Charlie’s old Sector 8 haunts, tucked away along a back alley and down a dark flight of stairs. A bar of sorts, with no name, but known as _Augusto’s _after the owner, it was in fact the owner’s small front room, where his pretty daughter served the drinks. Charlie and Tseng were the only customers. Augusto, who knew the score, had cleared everyone else out and locked the door. They were drinking dry, dry sherry, grown on the southern slopes of the mountains between Costa and Corel.   Tseng had wondered how such a tiny bar could make a living, until he saw the price of a single glass of the ruddy nectar.

            “The old maestro played me like a violin,” Charlie added, eyes crinkling with amusement. “He knew all along I’d say yes.”

            The room was dim, lit by the sallow glow from a single old-fashioned gas lamp set on the table. Charlie had pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. The flickering light sunk the two men’s eyes into darkness and carved shadows under their cheekbones.

            “We owe you our lives,” said Tseng. “You turned the tide yesterday. AVALANCHE recognised you, of course.”

            “It looks like the Legend’s not quite the washed-up has-been you thought, doesn’t it?”  Charlie smiled at Tseng and lit another one of his cigars.  Tseng preferred them to Reno’s cheap cigarettes; their aroma was rich and sweet.  The Legend had always had expensive tastes.  

            “It’s good to see Moe and Roz and Rude again,” said Charlie. “And Reno’s grown up, eh? What hard eyes he’s getting. Your new kids have a lot of promise. I liked that little one. Feisty. How is she? Any word?”

            “They had to put two pins in her leg to keep it straight before they could Cure her. You were right not to, Charlie; you’d have lamed her for life.”

            “Old Charlie knows what he’s doing.”

            “I wish you’d change your mind and stay.”

            Charlie chuckled. “That’s something else I never thought I’d live to hear.  I appreciate it, kiddo, but it wouldn’t work. Too much water under the bridge.  And that office isn’t big enough for the both of us.  It’ll be better for everyone if I stay in Junon and take my orders straight from Veld.  Special missions. Lone wolf. That’s my style.”

            “I can’t argue with that,” said Tseng. “Still, the mere fact that you’re back on board will make a big difference. Our enemies have perceived us as weak. That should change now.”

            “When Veld called me,” said Charlie, leaning back in his chair, “He said ‘the war’s not over’. Is that what this is, Tseng? A war?”

            “To the death, I think,” Tseng replied.

            “Ah. Good.” A broad grin creased Charlie’s tanned face. “Because that’s just the way I like it.”


	5. There's So Many Frivolous Things In This World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An eventful chapter, in which Reno spreads gossip, Aviva bites her tongue, a new Turk joins the team, Veld has a plan, and the office cat meets the company President

_ 2nd February 2002 _

“So this guy Charlie,” said Cavour in the office the next morning. “I think I’ve heard of him. He’s _the_ Legend, right?”

            “You got it,” said Mozo, unscrewing a bottle of white-out. “Used to be a mercenary. Fought for Wutai at the beginning of the war. He left such a trail of carnage their soldiers gave him a nickname: ‘The Legendary God of Death’. There’s the Five Mighty Gods, you see, and then there’s Charlie.”

            Rosalind giggled.

            “There’s probably a pagoda to him somewhere,” Mozo added. “Where they sacrifice virgins.”

            “So when did the Legend join the Turks?” Cavour asked Mozo.

            “Halfway through the war. The Chief talked him into changing sides.”

            Cavour tossed his head to throw his thick black fringe out of his eyes. “Where’s he been all this time? Why haven’t I seen him before?”

            “For the last five years he’s been under house arrest in Costa,” said Rosalind. While she spoke, she scrunched up a piece of paper, lobbed it at the wastepaper basket, and missed.

             “House arrest?  What for?”

            “Disobeying orders. One of the President’s chums was kidnapped by a rebel faction. The Chief sent Charlie in to rescue him. But Charlie killed him instead.”

            Cavour’s dark eyes widened in his swarthy face. “What?”

            “Well – refused to save him, anyway,” Rosalind amended.

            “There was some – history between them,” said Rude from behind his monitor. “Bad blood.”

            “And the Chief let him live?”

            Reno looked up from his robot. “Don’t go getting any ideas, Cavs.”

            “Reno’s right,” Mozo added, twisting the white-out cap back on. “The Legend’s always been a law unto himself.”

            “A part-time Turk is what he is,” said Reno. “Charlie does what Charlie wants, when _he_ wants to.  He must think we’re SOLDIER or something.”

            Mink took no part in this conversation.  She was crouched beside the opened photocopier, screw-driver in her right hand, examining its broken innards.  The cat, who had been chasing Rosalind’s scrunched-up ball of paper, came over to examine the row of nuts and washers Mink had neatly laid out on the blue tiled floor.

            “Coffee, anyone?” asked Rosalind, rising from her chair to pick up the ball of paper and place it in the bin.

            The cat nudged a washer with its paw. “Stop that,” Mink murmured, putting her hand over the cat’s face and giving it a gentle push backwards.

            They had tried out all sorts of names on the cat, but none had stuck. Sometimes they called it Reno’s cat, though the cat had made it clear that Rude was its favourite Turk: given half a chance, it would have spent all day draped around his broad shoulders, kneading the fabric of his jacket and purring contentedly.

            Sometimes when the Boss was in earshot they pretended to call it ‘Tseng’. Tseng was determined not to let them see that this annoyed him.  While he felt that having an animal in the department made them look unprofessional, there seemed to be no way of getting rid of the creature short of shooting it. He might have been able to get away with that when the cat first joined them, but if it went missing now the girls would know whom to blame.  Rosalind and Aviva lavished attention upon it, feeding it minced chocobo liver, tuna steaks and cream bought with their own money. Whether having this small soft thing to care for, sublimating their feminine instincts, made their work easier or harder for them, was a question Tseng often pondered, without ever coming to a satisfactory answer.

            The fact remained that the little ginger cat had become a fixture of the department.  It caught mice on a regular basis (and who would have imagined the Shinra building had so many? They cropped up in the oddest places: one of the Turks’ computers, for example. The cat staked out the CPU for a week before it finally caught its prey, and when it did, it first ate the body, without spilling a drop of blood, and then deposited the head at Tseng’s door. “What a suck up,” said Reno. “At least it knows who’s the boss,” Tseng retorted.).

           Occasionally it caught one of the large rats, flea-infested and yellow-toothed, that got into the building from the sewers and gnawed on the wiring.   Once, hearing a loud knocking inside the ventilation shaft, Cavour had unscrewed the grille to have a look, only to find the cat attempting to drag out a nearly-dead hedgehog pie three times its size.  It was on this occasion that Aviva, in all seriousness, suggested it might be the reincarnation of some long-lost Turk soul.

      “It works for its keep, I’ll give it that,” Tseng admitted.

            The little cat went where it pleased in the Shinra Building, as cats are wont to do, and because it was known as the Turks’ cat, nobody got in its way.  The girls’ one concern was that it might wander up to the 67th floor and be mistaken, or simply taken, for an experimental specimen.  However, when its curiosity did eventually lead it into the labs, Hojo merely ordered one of his underlings to take it back where it belonged.

            “The Professor’s allergic,” the scientist explained to Rosalind, handing the cat over.  He was dressed in dark corduroy trousers and a white lab coat, and his brown hair was thick and curly.

            Rosalind hugged the cat as close as she dared. “Thank you so much.  We were afraid you might – “

            The young man laughed. “It’s just an ordinary domestic cat. The Professor has no interest in such things.  But try to keep it off our floor. We don’t want cat hair contaminating the equipment.”

            He smiled at her. _What nice teeth he has_, Rosalind thought. _And nice eyes, too, behind the glasses._

He said, “By the way, I’m Phil. Phil Harper. If you ever lose your cat again, just, um, give me a call.  Or if you, um, ever felt like, um, going out for a drink, you could call me about that, too.”

_*_

_ The end of  February, 2002 _

            Rude and Reno had a new mission, unlike any they’d undertaken before.

            Deep inside the Plate, they were standing with the Chief in a very large, dark room with a high ceiling, almost the size of a warehouse, somewhere in the vicinity of Reactor 4. The air was warm and smelt of stale mako: no life had breathed inside this room for years.  Beneath their feet the steel girders throbbed to the beat of the reactor. It had taken them a good two hours to walk here from Reactor 8; the Chief had brought them on a circuitous route involving shafts, walkways, ladders, tunnels, small mountains of rubble, and several encounters with monsters.

            “Do you think you could find this place on your own?” Veld asked them, shining his flashlight into the corners.

            “Yes, sir,” said Rude.

            “Good,” said Veld, “Because it’s off the map. Officially, this area doesn’t even exist.”

            Their orders were to build some sort of holding pen, or bunker: Veld’s design indicated two small dormitories, a bathroom, a kitchen, a rest area, and a communications bay. They would have to run plumbing down from the mains, which were much higher up, just under the skin of the plate, and they would have to devise something inconspicuous for the waste pipes. Veld told Reno to splice the wiring as close to the reactor’s main artery as possible. Stealth modem cables would also have to be installed.

            “You should find pretty much everything you need lying around,” said Veld. “The contractors never cleaned up after themselves. I take it you know how to mix cement?”

            “Yes, sir,” said Rude.

            “What?” exclaimed Reno.

            “Construction site. Worked there six months when I was fifteen.”

            “Come on, follow me,” said Veld. Once again he led the way through the maze of the inner plate. The boom of Reactor 4 gradually faded behind them, and Reactor 5 grew louder ahead.  The room he took them to this time was much smaller, with a bed, a table, chairs, and various pieces of what looked like scientific equipment, including something both Rude and Reno recognised as a cloning tank like the one in Hojo’s lab.

            “This was Hollander’s lair, wasn’t it, sir?” asked Reno.

            Veld nodded. “As I thought, nothing’s been cleared away. Everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job. We’ve stripped the data from the computers, of course. I did it myself; you should find it’s all operational and clean.  Dismantle everything and move it to the room we were in before.”

            Rude pointed at the cloning tank questioningly.

            “That thing?” Veld’s tone was contemptuous. “We have no use for it. Destroy it.”

            “Roger, sir.”

            “And tell no one. About_ any_ of this.”

            The two Turks nodded. “Understood.”

_*_

_ March 2002 _

As he studied the chart of AVALANCHE activity that was slowly growing and elaborating like a wild vine across the whiteboard in his office, Veld could begin to discern a pattern. One or two big assaults were usually followed by months of quiescence, during which time, he presumed, they built up their supplies, planned their next campaigns, and recruited new members to replace the fallen.  That last, thought Veld, probably wasn’t difficult.  The economy was doing strange things these days. People who had a job, or owned land, or provided services, were prospering, but outside Midgar and Shinra jobs were hard to find, and in many parts of the planet the poor were struggling to survive.

            Midgar’s own slums undoubtedly provided AVALANCHE with a large percentage of their cannon fodder.  The Shinra media and the P.R.-Schools liaison department were working hard to raise public awareness of the dangers of being seduced into terrorist cells – but realistically, when you took a young man with no job and no future and offered him money and a gun and a purpose, what did you expect him to do? Commander Veld knew how that worked; none better. The difference between him and AVALANCHE was that he was determined to keep his people alive.

            Every day, when Veld woke up, the first thought that went through his mind was, _where are they_? Mentally he ticked them off, beginning with Tseng, and ending with Cissnei. Only when he was satisfied that he could account for each of the lives in his charge, knew where they were and what they were doing, only then did the weight of anxiety lift from his mind, allowing him to get up, make himself a coffee, and begin another day.

*

_ 16th April 2002 _

Dawn was breaking as Reno slipped from the bed of the brunette reactor technician in whose arms he had spent the night and made his getaway, closing her apartment door quietly on his way out so as not to wake her.  He went across town to the Shinra Building, and had a shower in the staff washrooms on the 64th floor before heading down to the office to see if anyone was around. In the materia room he found Aviva humming tunelessly to herself while she took an inventory: she was standing with her back to him, bent over a drawer full of garnet-coloured crystalline spheres, each one meticulously labeled in Rosalind’s neat handwriting.

            Though he would have preferred a larger audience, Aviva would do nicely for starters. She enjoyed a fresh piece of gossip almost as much as he did. From the unselfconscious way she hummed and moved he could tell she didn’t know he was there.  It would be fun to give her a little fright. Lounging against the doorpost, he said, “Hey, Veev – “

            She jumped like a startled cat, dropping the materia she held in her hand.  Reno flung himself forward and caught it before it hit the floor.

            “You really scared me!” she gasped.

            He could see he had; a pulse was throbbing in the base of her throat. “Didn’t mean to,” he smirked, reaching around her to put the materia back in its place.  Standing this close to her made him conscious of how small a thing she was. Her head barely reached his shoulder.  She was a bit like a materia herself, he thought: a little nugget of raw energy.

            Reno hadn’t seen much of their youngest Turk in the months since her near-death experience at the hands of the Legend in Junon; she’d been in hospital for weeks having her leg straightened, while he’d been working down in the bunker with Rude, or off on missions in pursuit of rumours from which they always returned empty-handed. According to Mozo, Charlie had been up from Junon five or six times just to see Aviva – which proved, Reno supposed, that the Legend had a conscience, of sorts.

            He slouched against the wall, hands in pockets, and by scrunching his shoulders forward he brought his eyes down almost to a level with hers.  “So listen, Veev - you’ll like this. Guess who I saw last night? In a dress. With a man. On a date. Roz! With one of the eggheads from the labs.”

            “I know.” Aviva was still a little breathless. “Dr Harper.”

            “What? You know about it? You know his name? And you didn’t tell me? Some friend you are!”

            He wasn’t really surprised to hear that Aviva already knew. She and Rosalind were tight, and girls always told each other this stuff. Probably she could fill him in on some of the juicier details, if he could get her to spill the beans.

            Aviva’s black eyes were earnest in her pale face. “Please don’t make fun of them. It’s serious.”

            “What – serious serious?”

            “She asked me not to tell anyone. Reno, please – don’t tease her about it.”

            “Shit. That serious, huh?”

            “It could be. She thinks he might – “ Aviva broke off short.

            “What? Might what? You don’t mean – “ Reno’s voice dropped an octave – “Marry her?”

            He had meant it as a joke – but Aviva’s look of guilty discomfort told him that he’d hit the mark dead centre.

            “Don’t tell her I told,” Aviva squirmed.

            “But Veev, this is a disaster! If Roz gets married, who’ll do my laundry?”

            She stared at him.

            _Hey kid_, he thought_, I’m trying to make you laugh here. You could at least crack a smile for me. _

 “Reno, please… “ She laid her hand on his arm, the lightest of touches. “Promise you won’t - well, you know. Don’t play any practical jokes or mess them around. Roz has been waiting for someone like Phil for a long time.  She’s really serious about him.”

            Reno’s eyes danced. “Aw, come on. How serious can it be? I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. How long’s she been going out with him?”

            “What’s that got to do with it? When you know, you know.”

            “Is that right?” He bent his mouth closer to her ear, grinning. “And how would _you_ know?”

            Her little face flushed pink. Quickly she turned away and tried to cover her confusion by busying herself with the materia, sliding the summons drawer shut, picking up her clipboard and moving along to the next case. He remained where he was, leaning against the wall, arms folded, waiting for the inevitable comeback. Aviva wasn’t the kind of kid to meekly let him - or anyone - have the last word.

            She shut the support materia cupboard with a slam and stood up straight to face him.  Her cheeks were burning. _Here we go_, he thought.

            “Not everyone is like _you_, Reno,” she blazed at him. “Some guys _like_ having one special girl. Some guys _want _to get married and settled down.”

            “Yeah, but – “ He pushed off from the wall and sloped over to her. “Look, don’t misunderstand me. Roz is my friend too.  I want her to be happy. But married? That’s just – unrealistic. And it wouldn’t make her happy, no matter what she thinks. People like us don’t get married.”

            “Knox did.” Even before she’d finished saying it, Aviva bit her lip; she’d realized it was a stupid thing to say.

            “Exactly. That’s my point.  People like us, Veev, we don’t get married, and if we do, we don’t stay married, because this job takes everything we’ve got. Nothing else is permanent.  Every other relationship’s going to fall short sooner or later, so the sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be, because nothing lasts forever – “

            He stopped abruptly, remembering whose words those were.

            Aviva took advantage of his pause to unleash a flood of indignation on him. “Is that right? And how would _you_ know, Mr Reno, with an attitude like that? You never give anyone a chance! For all you know the best thing that ever happened to you could be right under your nose and you wouldn’t see it because you’re too busy running around after all those girls like a – like a kid in a candy store, always going after the ones with the shiniest wrappers. Don’t you _ever_ wish you could find some special someone you could spend your life with?”  Red-cheeked and out of breath, she faltered and fell silent, looking anywhere but at his face.

            _Right now_ _I’d settle for someone who could take my mind off Cissnei for a few hours, _thought Reno wryly.He’d had no luck so far. But he kept trying.__

            Tseng’s voice interrupted them, calling from down the corridor, “Reno, can you come here? I’ve got a job for you.”

            “Be right there, Boss. Well, Veev, duty calls. “ Before Aviva could duck, he threw a playful punch that caught her lightly under the chin. “See you later, half-pint.”

            “I have work to do anyway,” she replied, clutching the clipboard to her chest.

*

_Extract from Aviva’s diary, 16_ _th_ _ April 2002_

_            Oh my god, I can’t believe I actually said that to him!!! I’m still shaking!! My handwriting’s all over the place.  _

_            It _ _would_ _ have to be _ _him_ _ who saw Roz and Phil together!!!_

_            I don’t know what came over me. I was _ _this_ _close_ _ to blurting it out. It’s like there’s this part of me that really _ _wants_ _ to tell. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to spontaneously combust from all the feelings I’ve got trapped inside. In a way it would be such a relief to let it all out._

_            But then what? He’d tell the Chief. He’d have to. And I’d get sent away. And I might never see him again. Which would officially make me the biggest idiot who ever opened her fat mouth._

*

_ May 2002 _

At the beginning of May Commander Veld brought a new recruit into the office.  The name she went by was Hunter. She was a tall, handsome girl, perhaps eighteen years old, with abundant light brown hair and hazel eyes. She came, Veld told them, from Mideel. That was all he would say.

            To Tseng alone did he explain the full story of how he had found her living rough in the woods beyond the ruins of Banora. She had fled like a wild animal at the sight of him, but he had waited patiently, and eventually she had returned. It was his suit that drew her back, she told him. Veld asked her when she had seen a suit like his before. _On the men who came to talk to Mr Rhapsodos_, she said; _the ones that Genesis killed. _She asked Veld if he, too, was hunting Genesis. If so, she said, he was out of luck.  The renegade SOLDIER hadn’t been back to what was left of his hometown for five or six months, at least.

            _He’s dead,_ Veld told her.

            The girl burst out sobbing when she heard this news, beating her head with her fists.

            _What’s wrong_? Veld asked.

            _I wanted to kill him myself!_ she cried.

            Bit by bit he pieced together her story. Her father had been old Mr Rhapsodos’ gamekeeper. On the day of the massacre, Hunter had been up in the foothills at the other end of the estate, checking the traplines, and thus she had escaped with her life when everyone else – her parents, her aunts and uncles and cousins, her neighbours and friends, and the two Turks – had died. 

            _Are you the one who buried them?_ Veld asked her.

            _Yes_, she said.  _So he couldn’t get them._

            After covering their remains as best she could, she had searched the village for survivors. No one was left but Mrs Hewley.  There were strange creatures everywhere: purple monsters, and things that were not quite men but that looked like Genesis. She had tried to persuade Mrs Hewley to leave, but Mrs Hewley would not go anywhere without her son’s sword, and even between the two of them they could not lift it.  For several days Hunter had hidden in the Hewley house. Then one afternoon she’d heard the sound of a helicopter approaching and had panicked, afraid that it was Genesis coming back.  Abandoning Mrs Hewley, she had fled, running without stopping until she reached the distant woods.  From there she had watched the bombs fall and the village burn.

            _You know who I work for, don’t you?_ said Veld.

            The girl nodded. She said she had realized at the time that it was Genesis Shinra were after.  The bombs had made no difference. The village was already dead.

            For more than two years Hunter had been living alone, foraging, hunting, doing whatever it took to survive. She was skilful with a shotgun and a skinning knife. These qualities, and her obvious intelligence, were the reasons the Commander gave for having hired her.  But as the days passed, Tseng saw that the other Turks were finding her difficult to work with. She lacked the humility becoming in a raw recruit. Her manner declared, _I can fend for myself; I don’t need you_. She was opinionated, demanding a reason for everything she was told to do, and if she didn’t like the reason, she would argue.

            Tseng was willing to acknowledge her strengths. He also understood why the Commander was so stubbornly determined to keep her, despite her obvious shortcomings. This insight he kept to himself.  What he did express privately to Veld was his concern that the girl might not be enough of a team player to make the grade.

             “Give her time,” said the Commander. “Keep her on unclassified missions for now and see how she shapes up. If she still isn’t fitting in, say, in three months’ time, I’ll see if I can transfer her out.  Maybe to SOLDIER.”

            “But SOLDIER doesn’t take women, sir.”

            “Well,” said Veld absently, “We’ll see, then.”

*

            Towards the end of May, when the work on the bunker was well under way, Reno found another postcard in his pigeonhole. On the front, President Shinra cutting the ribbon at the inauguration of the Junon cannon. On the back, this:

            _Dreamt of you last night. We were chasing Movers in the marine caves. I kept losing sight of you, then I’d find you again. I was sorry to wake up. Tell the guys I miss them._

He tucked the card away and went to the kitchen to pour himself a cup of black coffee. __

            Why was she jerking his chain like this? Was that, in fact, what she was doing?  Or was she trying to patch things up? Keep the lines of communication open? Send him some sort of message?

            His phone rang. “The President wants you upstairs,” said Tseng. “Stat.”

            “Wants _me?_ Or just a Turk?”

            “He asked for you particularly. Don’t keep him waiting.” Tseng hung up.

            This was a new one: Reno had never been summoned by name to the inner sanctum before.  When the Old Man wanted a Turk, he called Veld, and Veld sent the best man for the job. Wondering what he could possibly have done to attract the President’s personal attention, and how he might best talk his way out of trouble, if trouble was what this proved to be, he rode the elevator to the 69th floor (something he could never do without experiencing a knee-jerk surge of adrenaline), got out, and ran up the stairs to the Presidential office.

            Far away on the other side of the room, the stout old man in his crimson velvet suit stood with his back to Reno, gazing out the window.  Between them lay an expanse of marble floor geometrically patterned in shades of cream and charcoal, and so highly polished that Reno could see his own reflection in the tiles.  Four finely carved columns held up the domed ceiling; five more framed the huge windowpanes, their looking-glass sheen mirroring ghostly duplicates of the room, the President, and the red-haired Turk. Outside the window the liverish glow from the reactors flickered across the underbelly of the clouds. 

            “Mr President, sir?”

            “Reno.” The President turned around. He wasn’t smiling. “There’s something here that I understand belongs to you.”

            _Weird_. People hinted sometimes that the Old Man might have a screw or two loose. Maybe they were right. “To me, sir?”

            The President beckoned for Reno to come round the desk. This was a large semi-circular bulkhead of chrome and neon, raised up on a dais, and as complex as the cockpit of an airship.  Curious, but wary, Reno approached.

            In the President’s chair the little ginger cat lay curled up fast asleep, faintly purring.

            “This is your cat, isn’t it, Reno?”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Reno cautiously; the Old Man did not like to be contradicted. “It’s more, you might say, on the payroll. Rodent control officer, yeah.”

            The President was not amused. “Don’t be facetious. Are you telling me my building has a pest problem?”

            So many possible answers sprang to Reno’s mind in response to this question that he was momentarily at a loss for words.

            “Well?” demanded the President. “Speak up, boy.”

            “No, sir. It’s a, you know, precautionary measure.”

            “I don’t like cats,” the Old Man stated. “Take it away.”

            Was that all? Relieved, Reno reached forward to lift the cat from the chair. Before he could touch it, the cat opened one eye, yawned widely to display its mouthful of needle teeth, and stretched, unsheathing those switchblade claws.

            Reno said, “Let me go get my gloves and – “

            “Pansy! Just get rid of it. Here – “ the Old Man made a lunge for the scruff of the cat’s neck. Recoiling with a cry, he held his hand up in disbelief. “It bit me!”

            A drop of presidential blood fell onto the immaculate marble floor.

            “Kill it,” said the President.

            “But sir – “

            “Shoot it! Now!”

            “But sir – it’s just a cat; it didn’t know any better – “

            “Why are you arguing with me? Just kill it.”

            _Think, Reno, think. _“But sir – what about your chair? And it’ll make a mess of your desk. Why don’t I take it outside and – “

            “I don’t give a shit about the chair. And you can clean up the mess. What’s wrong with you, Turk? I told you to kill that madman Fuhito in Junon, and you wouldn’t, and now I’m telling you to kill a cat, and you have the nerve to say No? Who do you think you work for? I’m ordering you: shoot that cat. Now. Or I’ll have Veld sort you out once and for all.”

            _Fucking hell_, thought Reno, _the old guy’s batshit. But he’s the President. So maybe _I’m _the crazy one. What the hell _is _wrong with me? Why can’t I kill it? It’s just a cat…. Cissnei’s cat -_

            At that moment a rat emerged from behind one of the columns.

            It was large, it was grey, and it was ugly. Its long naked tail was as muscular as a snake. Its jagged incisors were the colour of old bones. Its small red eyes glistened like two fresh drops of blood.

            The President’s cheeks turned pale. “Reno – do something – “

            This time Reno did not hesitate. He drew his gun, but before he could take aim and fire a ginger streak came flying through the air, ears back, claws out, teeth bared. The cat landed on the rat’s back and bit deeply into its neck. The rat squeaked furiously, bucking and twisting, and for a few seconds the two animals became one single struggling ball of grey and orange fur rolling back and forth between the pillars. Bright smears of blood appeared on the shining floor. Then the cat broke free and came in for the kill, taking hold of the rat by its head and tossing it into the air with a loud neck-breaking snap.  The rat thudded to the floor, twitched, and was still. The cat sat down and began to clean its whiskers. Reno and the President stared.

            “Bugger me,” said the President, impressed in spite of himself. “Now that’s what I call a professional job. Reno, you could learn a thing or two from that cat. All right, go on, take it and get out of here.  Don’t let me see it up here again. And take that – carcass – with you.”

            Reno did not wait to be told twice. With the cat tucked against his shoulder, and the dead rat held at arm’s length, he sprinted down the stairs towards the elevator, pressed the call button, and jiggled impatiently from foot to foot.  The tips of the little cat’s claws prickled lightly on the skin of his neck.

            “Don’t even think about it, partner,” he warned. “You fucking lucky little furry bastard, how many of the original nine you suppose you got left after this?”

            “Reno,” said a voice behind him.

            Reno’s heart sank. Turning round, he saw Rufus step forward from the shadows between two pillars, Dark Nation following at his heel.

            _I am so not in the fucking mood for him right now_, thought Reno.

            Resting one hand on his cuahl’s head, Rufus said, “That was quite a risk you took just then. My old man expects his employees to do what they’re told.  Why wouldn’t you kill it?”

            _God knows. Because I’m stupid, OK? It’s just a cat. Cissnei’s cat. And it’s not like I think that as long as it stays here she’s bound to come back, or anything, because that would just be superstitious – _

He shrugged. “The girls are pretty fond of this little kitty. It’d be more than my life’s worth to let anything happen to it.”

            The elevator pinged; the doors slid open.  Reno stood aside to let the President’s son enter; Dark Nation followed, and Reno brought up the rear. “Mezzanine,” said Rufus. Reno pressed the button for him, asking, “You’re leaving the building? Who’s going with you?” because if Rufus went out without a bodyguard and the Chief ever found out Reno had let it happen, he’d be deader than this rat’s arse he was holding.

            “That new girl,” said Rufus. “Hunter.”

            Dark Nation sank down on its haunches. Its head was on a level with Rufus’ chest. It kept its slitted eyes fixed on the cat, though whether its expression was more hungry, or friendly, Reno couldn’t decide. 

            “They say a cat may look at a king,” said Rufus, reaching out to scratch the ginger cat behind its ear. Reno felt the rumble of its purr ignite.  

            Rufus smiled. “You know,” he said, “It’s possible I was wrong about you, Reno. You may have some redeeming qualities after all.”

            “That’s big of you, V.P.,” Reno replied, aiming for sincerity. “Thanks.”

            “I’d like you to teach me how to fly a helicopter. I’ll speak to Veld and arrange a time for the lessons. Oh, and you can give me that rat.”

            Lip curled, Reno held up the stiffening corpse. “What d’you want this for? I was going to throw it in the incinerator – “

            “Dark Nation likes them.” Rufus took the rat by the tail.

            _Kid’s weirder than ever, _thought Reno. Still, with a father like old Shinra…. If that was what families did to you, then Reno thanked his lucky stars he’d shucked his early on.

            The ‘M’ on the control panel lit up. The lift stopped; the doors parted. Hunter was standing there, an impatient scowl on her face. Reno held the doors open with one hand while Rufus and Dark Nation stepped out. Rufus, his face expressionless, held out the rat to Hunter. She looked at it in dismay, then glanced at Reno.

            The lift doors were closing. He gave her a mocking grin. “Better take the V.P.’s rat, rookie.” Her face darkened thunderously – but the doors were shut, and she was gone, and Rufus was gone, thank god.  Reno had the lift to himself. Putting the cat down, he pressed 48.  Then he took Cissnei’s postcard out of his pocket and resumed what he had been doing before he was so strangely interrupted.

*

_ 31st May, 2002. Departmental Briefing _

Tseng sat at the head of the table. Immediately to his left sat Rosalind, radiating happiness, and then Rude, listening carefully and offering the occasional pithy comment. Next to Rude sat Cavour, idly turning the small gold hoop in his left ear; next to Cavour, Aviva, surreptitiously rubbing at the ache in her game leg. Left of Aviva sat Knox, the dent in his skull clearly visible beneath the fuzz of new hair on his scalp; then Reno, tieless, shirt unbuttoned, half-asleep; then Skeeter, doodling explosions all over his note pad; then Mink, her rangy body slung sideways in her chair; and finally Mozo, his stiff brush of brown hair standing upright as if in astonishment above his beetling brows.

            The rookie was out on patrol in Sector Eight.  In the six weeks that had passed since Hunter's arrival in their department, she had set a new monster killing record.

            Tseng turned over the page of his briefing notebook, and continued, “Item three. New weapons testing, Quadra Island. Standard procedure.  Rude, Mink, Skeeter, you’ll be away three days. The helicopter leaves at 14.00 hours. You’ll be accompanied by Director Scarlet and her P.A. Now, item four – Ciara Bloom, freelance hacker. What can you tell us about her, Rosalind?”

            “We caught her attempting to break into our S-level encrypted files. She’s had quite a field day with our less protected stuff.  But she’s cocky. She didn’t cover her tracks as well as she thought she did.  This is her picture –“ Rosalind handed the paper across to Cavour – “And her address.”

            Cavour whistled. “Posh.”

            “Yes,” said Tseng, “She’s making good money. Find out who’s paying her before you sort her out.  Usual drill: bring back what you can, destroy what you can’t…”

            Meanwhile, Reno’s thoughts were drifting. These jobs on the table were nothing out of the ordinary, mere Turk bread and butter. He’d already been assigned his own mission: find and bring in whichever employee was passing stolen items from the Shinra shop to the fences in Wall Market. Cakewalk. 

            His eyelids felt like they had weights attached to them. He’d had a rough night. Broken sleep. Intense dreams…. 

             Tseng was saying, “Now, next item – the runaway pre-cog.”

            Skeeter asked, “Is it true they’ve lost their mojo?”

            Tseng nodded.  “Three of them are burnt out and the others are fading. It looks like putting them on mako literally drained their batteries.”

            “So why do we want this one back, sir? I mean, if he’s no use?” asked Aviva.

            “The integrity of the program has to be protected. With what he knows, and without his powers, he’s too vulnerable.  He was spotted in Kalm two days ago and may well still be there. Here’s the dossier.” He pushed the folder across to her. “Aviva, Mozo, you need to find him before our enemies do. Bring him back if you can.  Otherwise…..”

            _Last night I dreamed of you. I lost you; I found you –_

            Dreams, Reno reflected, could feel realer than the real thing. Awkwardly real. He’d been woken last night from his vivid dream by a girl whose name he couldn’t quite remember; she’d kicked him and demanded, in an offended kind of way, to know just who the hell this _Cissnei_ was. Well, there was no way he could tolerate that – the sound of her name on some strange girl’s tongue - so he’d got dressed and left and found a bar open late, or early, depending on how you looked at it, and then wandered back to the office and caught a little shut-eye in the lounge –

            “I’d like to move on to the last item on our agenda,” said Tseng. “AVALANCHE.”

            “They’ve been quiet too long,” said Knox. “They’re planning something.”

            _Well, duh,_ thought Reno. 

            Tseng said, “The Commander thinks their next move will be against Midgar, and that it will be a small-scale pinpoint raid against a single specific target. The worst case scenario would be an attack on the reactors. They’ve tried to blow one up before, and we have to expect that they’ll try again, probably quite soon. I know security’s been doubled, but – “

            Reno stifled a yawn. Same old yada yada: don’t relax your vigilance, keep your eyes and ears open, never forget they’re out to get you.  Sometimes Tseng acted like he thought they were _all_ rookies.

            It was frustrating, though, having to hang around waiting for AVALANCHE to make the first move.  None of them liked being thrown onto the back foot like this,  relying on guesswork, never able to relax, and never able to attack.  What they needed  - and what seemed impossible to get – was _information –_

Out of the blue the idea struck him.

            It came ready-assembled, complete down to the last detail. He saw at once that it was foolproof. And it was brilliant.

            Fuck it, _he_ was brilliant. The Boss was going to _love_ him for this.

            Tseng said, “… That’s all. Dismiss,” and began to gather his papers. The other Turks got to their feet and left, coffee cups in hand, dispersing to their various assignments.  Reno remained seated, one arm thrown over the back of his chair, drumming his fingers impatiently.

            Tseng looked up. “Don’t you have work to do?”

            “I’ve had an idea. Thought you might like to hear it.”

            “About what?”

            “Just a sec. I don’t want Rude to overhear this.” Reno went to the door, closed it, pulled a chair close to Tseng, and sat down. “It’s about AVALANCHE. I think we need to pull a Chelsey on them.”

            Tseng frowned. “What?”

            “You know. Get inside. Infiltrate them. Find out what they’re doing.”

            Tseng leaned back in his seat, arms folded, and gave his subordinate a considering stare, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether Reno was pulling his leg or being serious.

            “You haven’t forgotten Chelsey?” Reno asked him.

            “Reno, do you really think that idea has never occurred to us?”

             “Well, if it has, you haven’t done anything about it, because everybody’s still…..” 

            The words died on his lips as the realization hit him.

            It was one of those moments of illumination that were almost blinding in their obviousness. So, that was what she was up to! Reno felt a prick of annoyance with himself for having been so dense.  Then, as the revelation took shape more firmly in his mind, and he realized exactly what it was that Tseng and the Chief had had in mind when they chose Cissnei for this mission, a wave of pure relief swept through him that felt almost like joy. He burst out laughing.

            “What?” Tseng frowned. “What’s so funny?”

            “All I can say is, if Fuhito’s your mark, you’d have done better to send Skeeter.”

            “Reno, I’ve warned you before not to speculate about other Turks’ missions.”

            “Oh, come on. Tell me I’m wrong, then.”

            Tseng kept his lips sealed.  He didn’t look happy.

            Reno grinned. “See? I knew it. But you’re way off beam with this one. Our friend Fu-fu-fu-hito’s as gay as a rainbow chocobo – you only have to look at him to know that. I’ve meet the guy, remember?” He paused, and went on more seriously, “Boss, don’t you ever think sometimes you might be taking this whole secretiveness shit a bit too far? I mean, you could have asked me. You could have said, Hey, Reno, you’ve met this twat, twice, so what d’you make of him? I could have saved you a lot of trouble. Could have saved us all a lot of time. So – has she had any luck?”

            “None whatsoever,” Tseng admitted.

            “She made contact with them?”

            “We thought so, once, but the trail dried up.”

            They both fell silent. Reno continued to study his boss’ face closely. Tseng stared off into the middle distance, his eyes hooded, his thoughts veiled.

            Reno was not deceived. He broke the silence, “Don’t tell me you’re not thinking about Nats, because I know you are.”

            “We’re all in danger,” replied Tseng slowly. “Whether we’re here in Midgar, or out in the field. The less people who know about her mission, the safer she is.  We haven’t told the Board.”

            “I guess that’s why she’s still alive.” A pulse of fear shot through him.  “She _is_ still alive, isn’t she?  When did you last hear from her?”

             “The day before yesterday.”

            Reno took a deep breath. “So she’s OK. For now. But it’s been months. Her mission’s a failure, you said so yourself.  And the longer she’s out there, the more she’s exposed. You should bring her home, Boss.  Tell the Chief he needs to bring her home.”

            “If we bring her home, we have nothing.”

            “We’ve got nothing now, so we’ve got nothing to lose. Maybe you should try something different.”

            “And you have a suggestion?”

            This came out a little more sarcastically than Tseng had perhaps intended. Reno grinned. “Yeah, I do. It came to me in a flash of genius just as I was nodding off during the meeting.”

            Tseng raised his eyebrows. “All right. Tell me.”

            “Send Charlie instead.” And when Tseng made a gesture as if to brush the notion aside, Reno insisted, “C’mon, think about it. He’d be perfect. He’s changed sides before, so they’d believe it of him.  And they’d want him. The Legend. Feather in their cap. And it’d be easy to come up with some story for him, like he’s after more money, or he’s sick of the way you’ve been treating him after all those years in Costa.  They’d swallow that. Seriously, Boss – Charlie’s the only one of us with a rat’s chance of infiltrating AVALANCHE. You should bring Ciss home, and send him. If, that is, you trust him.”

            “I’d trust him with my life,” said Tseng with feeling.

            “Yeah? You didn’t use to feel that way.”

            “I think I understand him better now.”

            Reno was torn between exasperation and amusement. _Sometimes_, he thought, _I just don’t get this guy at all._ The Boss took likings to the most unlikely people, people you’d think he’d have more reason to loathe. Like Zack Fair. And now Charlie.  But whatever. If it brought Cissnei home, Reno was good with it. And who knew – Charlie might blow himself up.  Or he might even succeed. If he couldn’t, no one could: Reno was sure of that much, at least.

            “So how about a bonus for my brilliant idea, Boss?”

            “Nice try,” Tseng almost smiled. “But any inspirations you have on company time are Shinra’s intellectual property. You ought to know that, Reno.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 'gay as a rainbow chocobo' line is borrowed from OrgLIX and their Crisis Perverted series on youtube; it seemed exactly like the kind of saying that would have common currency in their world.  
> The new Turk 'Hunter' is more usually called 'Shotgun', and is the one most often featured in scripts or downloads of BC gameplay.


	6. This Train We're On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aviva sees more than is good for her, and plans must be changed at short notice

_ Extract from Aviva’s Diary _

_3rd June, 2002_

            _…. Shooting competition down at the range today. It just kind of happened. Roz was coaching me, and Hunter and Cavs showed up for practice. Cavs said, ‘let’s do best of thirty, winner buys a round’. Hunter says, ‘I don’t drink’, and Cavs says, ‘even if you don’t raise your wrist you can still open your wallet, can’t you?’  So she gets huffy and says ‘bring it on’. _

_            It was pistols. Roz won. Nobody’s better than her, not even Mr Tseng.  She awes me. It was kind of silly, though, because they’re all amazing in their own way. Hunter is the best with a rifle and Cavs can hit two targets at the same time with two different shotguns while he’s moving, even if he doesn’t hit the bullseyes.  _

_            I wasn’t in the running, of course, though I’m pretty handy with a pistol now.  I’m still the best with the knives. On the other hand, I don’t exactly have a lot of competition. _

_            I kind of hoped Hunter and me would become friends, but she’s let us all know that she doesn’t need friends.  If she made friends with anyone it would be Cavs. They can talk about guns until you want to go stick your head in the toilet and flush it.  But she rubs him up the wrong way because she always has to know best, and they usually end up arguing._

_              R has a nickname for her. He calls her ‘Honey’.  She can’t stand it. He knows; that’s why he does it.  If she were friendlier I’d tell her not to let him see that he gets under her skin. I’m quite the expert on that subject…._

*

            Tseng said no more to Reno about his suggestion regarding Charlie.  Although it came hard to him, Reno resisted the urge to ask.  On the eighth of June his patience was rewarded, when he slid his hand into his pigeonhole and pulled out another postcard:

            _Mission concluded. I’ll be home in a week. Looking forward to seeing you. Let’s find some time to talk._

_*_

_ Extracts from Aviva’s diary _

_15th June, 2002_

_            …He’s been acting kind of odd all week. Restless – I mean, more so than usual. Jumpy and distracted. Years ago when I was really small I remember having a birthday and being so excited about it, I couldn’t wait.  That’s how R is now.  I wonder why…._

_ ._

_16th June, 2002_

_Dear Diary, _

_A new girl started in the office today…. Except she’s not a new girl, she’s been with the Department for years, they said. Knox, Moe, Roz, Rude, they all know her really well and were so happy to see her.  Break out the champagne! And so on.  We, I mean us noobs, never even knew she existed. Of course we’ll never know why she was kept a secret. All this wondering and not knowing does my head in sometimes….  _

 .

            Cissnei returned to the office like a ray of spring sunshine, shining alike on the just and the unjust, sharing her smiles equally among them all. She accepted a hug from Mozo, and laid the back of her hand gently against Knox’s scarred face; she stood on tip-toe to kiss Rude’s cheek, threw her arms around Rosalind, and laughingly pretended to straighten Tseng’s tie.

            Reno she held at arm’s length, clasping his hands loosely.

            Why did she insist on this distance? What was she afraid of?

            _I forgive you. I miss you. I dreamed of you_. Had she written those words, or had _he_ dreamt them?

            “It’s getting so crowded in here!” she laughed, going round and shaking the hands of all the new ones.  “And Reno, my god, your cat’s still here!”

            Then she was summoned upstairs to debrief, and he didn’t see her for the rest of the morning.

            Rude took him aside. “Be careful.”

            ‘What?” Reno jittered. “What are you talking about?”

            “You know.” Rude gave him a look over the tops of his sunglasses. “You want the Chief to fry your ass?”

            “That obvious, huh?”

            “I’m just saying.”

            He couldn’t sit still. He found excuses to run around the building, doing errands. When that palled, he spent half an hour on the treadmill.  In the afternoon she came back to the office, and he managed, at last, to catch her alone in the kitchen.

            “Tonight,” he said, “Come for a drink. We can talk.”

            She folded her arms across her chest in that way she had, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “We’re all going to the Goblins tonight.  First round’s on me.  I’m looking forward to getting to know the new guys. I shouldn’t really call them the new guys, though, should I?  To them, I must be the new guy.  So much has changed – “

            “Not me.”

            Was it his imagination, or did she actually look at him for a split second, before her glance slid away onto the innocuous coffee pot? “No,” she said, “You never change, do you? I mean, look at you – “

            Aviva limped in through the doorway, saw them, turned red and stammered, “Oh, excuse me – “

            “It’s OK, you’re not interrupting anything.” Cissnei smiled at her and beckoned her in. “You want coffee? Give me your mug, I’ll be mother. Sugar? Three? Oh, you’ve got a wicked sweet tooth, just like me.  Milk? Say when. Hey, I like those earrings. Where did you get them?....”

            She and Aviva went out of the kitchen together, with Cissnei doing all the talking.

             That night Reno arrived at the Goblins early and kept the seat beside him free, but when Cissnei finally arrived she cheerfully insisted on drawing up a chair between Mink and Skeeter.  Fine; it didn’t matter; he could wait. Sooner or later, when everyone else had gone home, he would have her to himself.  And if she tried to outsmart him by leaving early, he would follow her, tail her through the streets of Midgar until he found where she was staying, and he would knock on her door, and if she didn’t answer, that wouldn’t matter either, because there wasn’t a lock made that could keep Reno of the Turks out of any place he wanted to be. And then they would talk. He just wanted to talk to her.

            But eventually, as the evening wore on, he had to excuse himself to use the washrooms, and when he returned to their table, she was gone. 

            “She said she’s worn out,” Mozo told him. “And I can’t say I blame her. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, who’s for another round? Come on, Reno – sit down and chip in.”

            They were all looking at him expectantly.

            And even though it was the last thing he wanted to do, he sat back down, thinking, _never mind, never mind. Stay cool. There’s always tomorrow._

_._

_ Extract from Aviva’s diary _

_16th June, 2002, continued_

_            …It’s so unfair. She’s so beautiful, and she doesn’t even have to try.  She wears the same suit as the rest of us, and she doesn’t have any make-up, and she doesn’t do anything with her hair, just lets it part in the middle and fall sort of straggly either side of her face, and she’s still so gorgeous I feel sick just thinking about it.  She isn’t even all that much taller than me, and she’s kind of skinny, and she’s got no hips, but it doesn’t matter, because she has It – she’s the girl everyone turns to look at when she walks into a room. _

_            And she’s nice. She’s really nice. I wish she wasn’t. I wish I could loathe her guts. But I can’t._

_            He looks at her the way Phil looks at Roz. Like Rude used to look at Chelsey._

_            I don’t know who else sees this. Rude does, I think. I catch him looking at the two of them, and when he sees me, he quickly looks somewhere else. _

_            I’m watching all of them, and no one’s watching me. _

_._

            When Reno came into work the next morning she was already there, head bent over her paperwork as if she’d never been away.  For a little while he was content merely to watch her out of the corner of his eye.  Even the sound of her pen scratching across the forms was sweet, when he had missed it for so long.  Only now did he fully realize how empty the office had been without her – like a lamp without a bulb. Like an unmade bed growing cold in the morning… __

            By 11.30 he had had enough of waiting. It was time to take the initiative. Rolling his chair across the floor, he slid a pile of papers under Cissnei’s elbow. “For your _earliest_ attention,” he said.

            Rolling back to his desk, he watched her as she leafed through them. They were printouts of old mission reports from two, three years ago, missions they’d carried out together.  At the bottom of the last one he’d written in pencil **why are you avoiding me?**

_Private email_

_From:      Cissnei_

_To:         Reno_

_Date:      2002/06/17  11.46 am_

_Subject:   Back off_

_I just got back! Let me catch my breath, OK?_

            Having read this, he looked up and saw her putting the old mission reports through the shredder.  The only other person in the office was Rosalind, deeply engrossed in something on her computer screen.  Reno cleared his throat loudly. Rosalind ignored him, but Cissnei glanced up. He stuck his tongue out at her.

            Score! She started giggling; she couldn’t help herself.  Just like old times.

            _Fuckwit_, she mouthed at him, smiling.

            He held up his hands as if to say, _what can I do about it? _ Then he pointed at her, at himself, made a talking hand sign, and mouthed the question, _When?_

She mimed the action of someone screwing his thumb down too hard.

            _Me_? he gestured, all innocence.

            She tapped her watch, put her hands on either side of her head, and danced around in a little circle. He had no idea what she was trying to convey, but it was fun to watch her.

            “Ahem,” said Rosalind, who had looked up and was observing this foolery with some amusement.

            Cissnei acted out a dramatic sigh, rolling her eyes and slumping her shoulders. Then she said, “Saturday,” and turned back to her desk.

            “Saturday what?” asked Rosalind.

            “Big date,” said Cissnei.

            “That’s nice,” said Rosalind absently, returning to her emails, and to dreams of a big date of her own.

.

            _Later that same day, an awkward moment…_

At 12.00 noon exactly, Cissnei and Rosalind were called to the Commander’s office, leaving Reno alone. Rosalind returned about an hour later, and told him that Cissnei had gone for lunch.  He hurried out after her, but the trail was cold; he had to content himself with a sandwich and a plastic cup of beer, bought from a mobile stall under the Clock Arch and eaten standing up. It was one of those rare days when the clouds above Midgar briefly parted, allowing glimpses of the blue sky beyond. People had seated themselves all around the fountain and on the steps leading to the upper streets; they tipped their heads back, basking in the sun’s rays. Dusty golden fingers of light touched the roof of the Shinra building. Reno felt absurdly happy.

            On the way back, he bumped into Cissnei in the mezzanine. She looked a little distracted, but when she saw him her expression cleared and she smiled.  “Going up?” she said. They had the elevator to themselves. The doors were just closing, when someone on the other side pressed the button; Reno inwardly cursed.  The lift juddered, and the doors slid open again.

            It was Zack.

            He stared at them both with those monstrous blue eyes, and took a step backwards.

            “Oh, don’t be an ass,” said Cissnei. “Get in.”

            They had to shuffle round to accommodate the sword he was wearing on his back.  The doors closed, and the elevator began its ascent.

            “Hey. Cissnei. Reno,” said Zack a little stiffly and much too late.

            “How are you?” said Cissnei.

            “Well, you know,” he said. “Same as usual.”

            “And how’s Aerith?”

            He gave her a wary glance. “She’s OK.”

            “Lazard keeping you busy?”

            She was making a brave job of it, but Reno could hear the tiny quiver in her voice. He put a hand on the small of her back, just to steady her – though from Zack’s perspective the gesture might well look a little possessive, he acknowledged, noting with satisfaction how those blue eyes narrowed. Cissnei made no move to brush Reno’s hand away; in fact, he could have sworn he felt her lean into his touch, just a fraction.

            “The Executive Director’s been out of the office all week,”  Zack told them. “It’s been kind of quiet. I’m going down with one of your guys to Mideel tomorrow, and then next week I’m off on furlough.”

            “Nice,” said Cissnei. “You and Aerith going somewhere?”

            “Just me,” said Zack. “I was kind of told to take my holiday now. Not really in the mood, to be honest.”

            “I wouldn’t complain,” said Reno. “At least you get one.”

            “Here’s our floor,” said Cissnei. She stepped out of the elevator, with Reno right behind, his hand still pressing against her back.  She stopped, turned round, and said, “Nice talking with you, Zack. See you sometime.”

            Zack rubbed his spiky shock of black hair. “Yeah. Sure,” he said as the doors closed in front of his face. Then he was gone.

            Cissnei shook her head.  “He never learns, does he?”

            “What?” asked Reno.

            “To keep his big gob shut.” She drew a long, ragged breath. “Well, that’s over. You can take your hand off me now.”

            Reluctantly, he did so. “You OK, Ciss?”

            “Yeah. It was a shock, but not the way you think.” She’d turned to face him, arms crossed, one hand touching her chin thoughtfully. “He’s like a big kid, isn’t he? You know what they used to call him, Angeal and the others? The puppy, falling over his own feet. He _is _kind of dopey looking, really, isn’t he? _And _he’s two years younger than I am. What did I ever see in him? I must have been certifiably insane.”

            He wanted so badly to believe her that he wasn’t sure he dared to.

            “About Saturday – “ he began.

            “Oh, yeah. About that. Listen, Reno – I have to go away tomorrow. That’s what the Commander was seeing Roz and me about.  He’s sending us on a mission.”

            “Uh-huh,” said Reno, wondering what the truth was. “What mission?”

            “It’s Lazard,” she said. “He’s not just ‘out of the office’. He’s gone and done a runner, and he’s taken all the SOLDIER data with him.”

*

_Form S-DAR.INC/REP:2S_

_ **SHINRA ELECTRIC COMPANY** _

_ **Department of Administrative Research** _

_ **Incident Report** _

_Date:                17th/18th June 2002_

_Time:               c. 23.00 pm -2.00 am_

_Location:          Shinra Headquarters, Midgar_

_Report filed by: Tseng_

_Summary: AVALANCHE attack: HQ security breached, labs invaded, classified samples released. Turks mobilized. Professor Hojo abducted. R_ _escued by Sephiroth._

_ **Analysis:** _

_A small group of AVALANCHE operatives (approx.10-12) breached HQ security at around 23.00 hours on the night of the 17th June 2002; a subsequent body search of dead operatives revealed they were carrying forged key cards. Enemy made their way directly to the laboratories on the 66th floor, demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of the layout of the high security areas of the building. They killed the guards and the scientists on duty and released a number of classified research samples, the intention evidently being to tie up the Turks in the recapture and/or elimination of said samples. All Turks were immediately mobilized. Evacuation of upper floors was initiated, and the Executive Boardroom was put into lockdown. _

_     AVALANCHE operatives, including their leader Fuhito, escaped with Professor Hojo via the roof, stealing a helicopter. The Turk who witnessed the event states that Professor Hojo did not appear to go unwillingly. The President ordered that Sephiroth be called out to deal with the problem._

_     The other helicopters having been disabled, I continued the pursuit by jeep, accompanied by agents Rosalind, Cavour, and Hunter. The enemy agent known as ‘Shears’ bombed the highway; jeep crashed. Rosalind unconscious; Cavour’s arm broken. I fought Shears. Helicopter returned and picked him up. Large dragon-type monster manifested itself – it remains unclear if this was the result of enemy action or if its lair was under the highway, in which case the bomb must have woken it. _

_     Team undertook attack on dragon. Dragon was exceedingly powerful. All attempts to subdue it were unsuccessful. Sephiroth then arrived..._

     Tseng’s fingers paused on the keyboard. A formal incident report was not the place to put into words the feelings experienced by himself and the other Turks at the sight of Sephiroth in action. Yet no matter how he phrased it, the sequence of events that followed would seem unbelievable to anyone who had not seen it with their own eyes:

_Sephiroth killed the dragon with one stroke. He disabled the helicopter from a distance of about one mile using Fire materia and then brought it safely to ground using Gravity…._

     At times like this Tseng was compelled to wonder why somebody with Sephiroth’s powers was, apparently, content to go through life taking orders from Shinra. Fighting never seemed to give him any pleasure. He manifested neither excitement at the prospect of battle nor satisfaction when he had won, but merely came in, did his stuff, and left, leaving awe and fear in his wake.  His strength was such that, had he chosen to, he could have taken over the company by barely lifting a finger.  Yet this thought had apparently never occurred to the Old Man, who trusted Sephiroth in a way that he’d never trusted either of his own sons. It was as if… As if the President took it for granted that Sephiroth was incapable of wanting anything that Shinra did not choose to give him; as if he had no desires of his own.  The human lightning bolt –

            But that was the question, wasn’t it?

            A question it was not Tseng’s business to ask.  Either way, what did it matter? Man or monster, as long as Sephiroth worked for Shinra, he was an ally, and if the day ever came when he decided to follow in Genesis’ footsteps and turn against Shinra, he would be dealt with. 

            The Turks always found a way.  During this very attack, Skeeter had worked out how to destroy AVALANCHE’s respawning black Ravens: he’d pushed the one he’d found in Hojo’s lab into the incinerator, and that had finished it off. They key, then, was to completely destroy their physical bodies before they had time to regenerate. Skeeter had shown commendable resourcefulness; Tseng reminded himself not to forget to mention it. First, though, he’d finish this report –

_Professor Hojo recovered unharmed from downed helicopter. No sign of Shears or other AVALANCHE operatives. Professor Hojo said they parachuted from the helicopter shortly before Sephiroth appeared. I called for transport, and escorted the Professor back to HQ. Supervised clean-up of labs._

_     Addendum: Casualities_

_     Injured: The following Turks sustained serious, but non-life-threatening injuries: Skeeter, Rosalind, Hunter, Cavour, Rude. _

_     Dead: Sergeant Caulfield; Warrant Officer Strang; Private Lee; Dr. Samira Rayleigh; Dr Philip Harper; Angela Nomura, lab asst. The bodies of seven AVALANCHE operatives were also recovered._

            “Good work,” said the Commander, as he counter-signed the report. “They may have got past our security, but they left with empty hands.  I suppose it’s a victory for us that Hojo is back.  So was he our mole, do you think?”

            “It looks that way,” said Tseng. “But I don’t think he’ll be leaking any more information to them. He seemed quite… disappointed in their whole operation.  He said he had been misled into believing their achievements were more significant than they turned out to be.  And of course he was delighted with Sephiroth’s performance.”

            “Rufus was spitting fury in the Boardroom,” Veld told him. “I’ve never seen the boy so angry. “

            “He thought it was Hojo all along,” Tseng pointed out.

            “How many of the samples did you have to kill?”

            “All of them.”

            “Well, it’ll keep Hojo busy, making some more.” Veld paused. “It’s too bad about Dr Harper. He seemed like a decent guy. How’s Rosalind?”

            “Too concussed to take it in.”

            “Poor girl. It’s a damned tragedy. Bloody AVALANCHE. They’ll pay for all this one day, Tseng, we’ll make sure of that. Not that that will bring her man back. We must do whatever is necessary to help her get through this.  She’s going to need to take some time off.”

            “I’ll offer it, sir. But my guess is she’ll prefer to work.”

            “Well, we’ll let her set the pace. In the meantime, someone will have to replace her on the Lazard mission. Send Reno. He’s been down in the bowels of the plate for the last five months; he deserves some fly time.  And he works well with Cissnei, doesn’t he?”

            “I think he’s very glad she’s back.  Reno’s not always the easiest man to work with, as you know, sir, but he’s completely loyal to his partners.”

            “Yes, they always made a good team. It’s settled then.  Make the arrangements.” Veld stood up.  “I’m going to go sit with Rosalind for a while.”

 


	7. Just Say The Word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno learns the answer to a question that has been bothering him for some time

            They were halfway across the Inland Sea, with no land in sight in any direction, before Reno could get a word out of Cissnei beyond what was strictly necessary. She sat in the co-pilot’s seat with her body curved away from him, staring out the window at the crinkled surface of the ocean far below.

            “C’mon, Ciss, quit sulking.”

            Her only response was to hunch her shoulders up a little higher.

            He tried again. “I didn’t _ask_ to come on this goddamn mission, you know.”

            “It should have been Roz,” she muttered.

            God, Roz. Splinted, bandaged and dazed in an infirmary bed, unaware that something worse than a grenade was going to hit her as soon as she came round. He was glad he didn’t have to be the one to tell her.

            “Fucking AVALANCHE,” Cissnei snarled.

            “We’ll get them.”

            She glanced over at him, and the look in her eyes softened to something slightly less glowering. “Damn right,” she said; then, folding her arms, she turned back and continued staring out the window.

*

            _They’ve been gone for nearly three hours now_, thought Aviva back at the office, _and I still can’t make up my mind.  Or maybe it’s too late. I should have said something straight away. But what? _

Why couldn’t Mr Tseng, who saw so much, and always knew the right thing to do, not see what was under his nose?  Was it because he had none of those feelings himself? A person who’d never been in love wouldn’t know what it looked like, would he? Reno said Mr Tseng was in love with their Sector Five surveillance target; he said that was why they had to stake out the church and keep an eye on her all the time, but Aviva knew he was just joking.

            _I don’t want to get them into trouble, _she told herself. _I want to keep them out of trouble. What I feel isn’t important right now. I have to do what’s right._

*           

            Reno refused to dwell on thoughts of Rosalind, or the chain of events that had brought him here, to the cockpit of this helicopter, with Cissnei so close he could put out a hand and touch her. He refused to think about Lazard, or AVALANCHE, or Tseng, or Genesis, or Shinra.  The only thing that mattered was happening here, now.

            The afternoon sunlight poured through the windscreen and lit up each mote of dust. It was as if he was breathing stars. 

            Cissnei’s hair shone gold.  All he could see of her face was the curve of her cheekbone. The cockpit was warm with the heat of the sun and their own bodies. The scent of Cissnei, her skin, her hair, filled his senses.

            The air between them was charged with anticipation, like the sky over the Grasslands before an electrical storm.  All the little hairs down his arms were standing on end.

            She was staring out the window like she couldn’t feel it. Who did she think she was kidding?

*

            _Why should I have to be the one to say something? _Aviva thought almost angrily. _What if he found out it was me? He’d never forgive me. I can’t do it, I can’t. What about Rude? Why doesn’t he speak up?_

            Rude had been hurt in the action last night, but he’d been Cured and he was fine. Now he was sitting at his desk with his head down, and though Aviva kept trying to catch his eye, she couldn’t.  He was doing it deliberately, she could tell.

            Finally she came to a decision. Getting to her feet, she walked over to Rude’s desk and stood there waiting, hands on hips. Eventually he was forced to look up. She saw at once that he was thinking what she was thinking; she was getting quite adept at seeing past the defense of his purple lenses.  A small crease had appeared between his eyebrows, and his mouth curved downwards.

            He gave her a hard look. Then he shook his head, very slightly. A piece of advice; a warning.

            _Don’t get involved._

*

            They had left the golden beaches and red tile roofs of Costa del Sol far behind them, and were passing over the spine of the mountain range that ran down the length of the Western Continent, when Reno decided that Cissnei had been silent long enough. With any girl, in his experience, the crucial thing was to keep them talking. So he said, “Explain to me again why we’re going to Nibelheim.”

            Cissnei glanced at him from the corner of her eye – warily? Wearily? Hard to tell – and shifted in her seat so that he could now see her profile. “We’ve known for months that Hollander was working with Genesis, and now we’ve got evidence Lazard’s been funding them. Since we’ve no leads on where Lazard has gone, we start by checking out the places connected to Genesis.  Roz ran a stats analysis a couple of days ago, and Nibelheim’s the place with the largest number of clone sightings.”

            “Anyone talk to Hollander?”

            “Yeah.” For the first time, Cissnei smiled. “Tseng did.”

            Reno chuckled. After his brush with death on the runaway elevator, the thought of Hollander in the Boss’ hands was something to savour.

            The sound of his laughter seemed to please her. She gave him another quick glance, another little smile.  “Yeah. But turns out Hollander knows nothing that we didn’t know already. The Chief thinks Lazard will lie low until the fuss dies down and then try to make contact with Hollander.  Nibelheim’s an obvious choice for a hideout. It’s remote, and there’s all those caves in the mountains beyond the town. Somebody could hide there for years and never be found.”

            “And there’s the mansion,” said Reno. “God knows what stuff’s still in there. Isn’t there an old lab in the basement, from when the reactor was first built? How long’s that place been shut up?”

            “I dunno. Longer than we’ve been working for Shinra, anyhow.”

            “So where d’you want to start?”

            “The reactor?” she suggested. “Might as well talk to our own people first. Where can you land?”

            “I can set it down behind the mansion. Then we’ll have to walk.”

            “What about the cable car?”

            “Down for routine maintenance, Tseng told me.”

            “Screw that,” said Cissnei. “Let’s see if we can get some chocobos.”

*

            There were no chocobos.

            The man at the inn thought that if they drove south for an hour or so they might come to a farm where the farmer sometimes had chocobos for hire. Maybe just one. Or it might have been sold.  He wasn’t sure.

            “They’ve got mountain chocobos up at the reactor,” said Reno. “I could call them and ask them to bring a couple down for us.”

            Cissnei shook her head. “It’ll be dark in an hour, anyway. Let’s just check in.  We can use the time until dinner to talk to the townspeople, find out what they know. We’ll go up the mountain tomorrow.”

            “This is on the Shinra account, right?” said the innkeeper. “Two singles?”

            “Yes, please,” said Cissnei.

*

            They met again for dinner in the little dining room at the back of the inn. There were no other guests.  The room had a pleasant atmosphere: colourful rugs brightened the cedarwood floor, and the walls were half-timbered, dark beams angling through rough white plaster. A red and white checked cloth covered the table where Cissnei and Reno sat. In the big stone fireplace a pyramid of logs was burning brightly: the heat from the fire warmed Reno’s back and Cissnei’s face. The only other light in the room came from half a dozen yellow candles, jammed into old wine bottles set out on the tables.

            “Rustic,” was Reno’s comment.

            The menu comprised a single item: rabbit stew with potatoes.

            “And two cold beers,” Reno ordered. He lit a cigarette, turned to Cissnei, and asked her, “So, what did you find out?”

            “I found out that this inn is haunted. And the mansion. And the mountain paths. The reactor’s haunted too, go figure. A weird kid told me. He was hard to shake off.”

            “I met a weird kid,” said Reno. “But mine was a girl. Some jailbait loli in a cowboy costume. She said she was a guide but she looked simple-minded to me.”

            “This place is full of weird kids. Maybe it’s all the mako in the water.”

            “Nah,” said Reno. “They’re just inbred. Did you talk to any of the adults?”

            They were interrupted by the arrival of their beer, so deliciously cold that a film of water had condensed on the glasses. Cissnei took a long sip, wiped the foam from her mouth with the back of her hand, and said, “Nobody’s seen anything suspicious.  Or if they have, they’re not talking. But I think they would tell us. Shinra’s not unpopular here. The whole economy of this town depends on the reactor. Before Shinra came here, this place was nothing but a few huts clinging to the side of the mountain, and now look what they’ve got.  Power, running water, phones, TV....”

            But Reno had stopped listening to her long before, at the moment when she’d wiped the foam from her mouth, leaving her lips slightly reddened and moist, glistening in the candlelight.  The way those lips moved, the shapes they formed, mesmerized him. The soft line of an ‘m’ – the kiss-pursed ‘p’ – the round, surprised ‘o’…  A little triangle of pink, the tip of her tongue, darted out to lick a stray drop of beer from the corner of her mouth, then shyly hid itself again behind her small white teeth -

            “… So what might seem to a kid to be a ghost could actually be someone who’s doing their best to avoid being seen. I think it might be worth looking into. Don’t you? Reno? Reno! Have you heard a word I said?”

            Slowly he blinked his heavy eyelids. His teeth parted in a suggestive smile. “I love it when you talk shop,” he breathed.

            Cissnei frowned at him. “Cut it out, Red. Look, here’s our food.”

            The stew was bland. He toyed with it for a minute, then pushed it away.

            “C’mon, you have to eat,” said Cissnei.

            “Not hungry.”

            “You need to look after yourself.”

            “Stop nagging me.”

            Cissnei put her fork down. “All right. I didn’t want to say this, but I’m going to.  You don’t look good, Reno.  You’ve lost weight – a lot of weight. Hasn’t anybody said anything?  There’s hollows under your cheeks and your collarbones are sticking out. And your hair, it’s – it used to be so glossy. Now it’s like a sick animal.  To tell the truth, you look kind of… seedy.  Like you’ve been living on booze and cigarettes ever since I went away….” 

            She tailed off, realizing what she’d said: what she’d acknowledged.

            Reno took a long drag on a fresh cigarette. “Yeah. Since then.”

            “You know what?” said Cissnei. “I’m really not hungry either. I think I’ll go to my room – “

            She started to push back her chair, but perhaps she had forgotten just how fast he could move; a split second later his hand was around her arm, pinning it to the table.  For someone so thin, he was very strong. Cissnei froze.

            “Let go of me,” she said quietly.

            “Make me.”

            “You want me to fight you?”

            His grin stretched. “Maybe. Why not? Getting physical. Better’n nothing.”

            “Reno,” she squirmed in his grip. “Stop it.”

            “I just want you to talk to me. We started this conversation almost a year ago. We need to finish it.”

            “I told you – “

            “I remember. And I remember what you wrote to me on those postcards.  And all I want to know is – do you ever think about it?”

            She hesitated.

            He was so close to her that he could see himself reflected in her eyes. The tattoos on his cheekbones look like scars carved into his face.

            Cissnei turned her head. “No,” she said.

            But she was lying. He had seen it in the way her own eyes had grown a little sleepy, the pupils dilating, just before she looked away.  She’d been thinking about it, all right. She was imagining it right now. She’d been dreaming about it for months.  That’s why she had been fighting so hard to keep the distance between them: she’d been afraid of what would happen if she let her guard down.

             She wanted him. Or she wanted what he was offering, if only she would allow herself to take it.

            He loosened his grip, though he did not take his hand off her arm. If she had really wanted to she could have broken free.  She did not move.

            Holding his breath, he gently stroked his thumb against the smoothness of her inner wrist.

            “Don’t do that,” she said, without much conviction. “I thought you - wanted to talk to me.”

            Beneath the skin of her wrist he could feel the pulse of a quickening heartbeat. She did not try to take her hand away, though it remained clenched.  Still moving his thumb in a slow caress, he said, “How long’s it been?”

            Cissnei closed her eyes. “Since Zack, nobody,” she admitted.

            “Mmm. Long time. And you never think of it? Doesn’t it drive you crazy sometimes – “

            “Oh, don’t,” she said huskily.

            Her hand had lost a little of its tension. It softened and opened. He stroked its palm with his fingertips.  Cissnei shivered.

            He said, “You know it would be good between us.”

            “It would be insane. The Chief would skin us alive and hang us out to dry.”

            “Might be worth it,” he said. “We won’t know until we try.”

            With one finger he traced the thin blue line of the vein that ran up her forearm. Cissnei held herself motionless. He pushed back her sleeve. Bending his head, he pressed a kiss into the soft crook of her elbow.  Cissnei made a noise deep inside her throat.  He licked her skin, tasted its faint saltiness, its musk. Cissnei trembled, and swallowed hard.

            Her voice quivered a little when she spoke. “I’ll admit, I am – attracted to you. But I don’t…”

            He lifted his head, leaned in closer. “What don’t you?” he whispered in her ear.

            “I don’t – love you like that. I’d just – be using you – “

            He put his mouth to her ear. “What are friends for?”

            “No,” she said; but she didn’t try to move or push him away.  He put out his tongue, touched its tip to the shell of her ear.

            “Oh god,” she groaned, “This is crazy.”

            “It’s OK,’ he said, forcing himself to sound calmer than he felt. His own pulse was drumming; his longing for her was in danger of escaping his control.  He didn’t want to frighten her off now, not when she was so close to giving in.  By an effort of will he kept his touch light as he kissed his way along her jawline, her ear, and down the nape of her neck where the short, soft hairs sprang. Cissnei sat very still and allowed him to do it. Her skin was growing flushed and hot.

             “Mmm,” he whispered in her ear. “You taste good.”

             Her breath was coming in little gasps.  He brushed his hand over her collarbone and down the front of her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breast in his hand felt larger than he had imagined, solid, almost hard, with a stiff little nipple, swollen like his own erection now pressing with painful insistence against his fly.  His senses were being overwhelmed; it was all he could do to resist the urge to bite her.

            “Don’t…” she murmured.

             “What?”

            “Unh – don’t stop – “

            He ran his tongue along the intricate folds of her ear, then took the fleshy pierced lobe between his lips and suckled on it, gently moving the small stud with his tongue.  Cissnei sighed and shivered.

            “I don’t love you either,” he said hoarsely, sliding two fingers under the waistband of her trousers. He felt the hard muscles of her abdomen tighten with desire. “I just want to fuck you.”

             That little word, so often bandied about carelessly between them, seemed to be all that was needed to push Cissnei over the edge. She groaned and arched her hips against his hand.

            “Say yes,” he breathed unsteadily, “You know you want to.”

            “Yes,” she gasped.

            “C’mon,” he said. 

            “Where?”

            “I don’t care. Your room?”

            “Yes.”

            Holding onto each other, they somehow made their way out of the dining room and through the empty lobby, and half-fell, half-stumbled up the stairs.  Reno began unbuckling Cissnei’s belt as she felt in her pocket for the key.  “Quick,” he said. “I’m trying,” she snapped. Twice she dropped it. “God,” he groaned, “Let me.” Finally the door unlocked. They pushed and pulled each other inside, pawing at one another’s trousers. “Shut the door,” Cissnei panted.  He slammed it shut with his foot, and they fell together onto the floor.

            It was over in less than a minute. Cissnei thrashed in his arms and yelled obscenities he would have sworn even she did not know. His own orgasm was so violent that he blacked out for a second and collapsed on top of her, coming to when his forehead struck the floor with a sharp crack.  Spent, dazed, they lay tangled together for several minutes, trying to catch their breaths.

            Cissnei was the first to move. Turning her head away from him, she folded her arm over her eyes. “Oh, shit,” she exclaimed, half laughing, half-groaning. “Now we’ve fucking done it.”

            Reno sat up, struggling with the suit trousers tangled around his ankles. “I’ve still got my boots on,” he laughed, and pulled them off; the knife fell out of his left boot and spun under the bed.  Kicking his legs free of the trousers, it took him only a few moment to strip off his socks and his jacket, unbuckle his two shoulder holsters, and pull his shirt inside out over his head.  Last of all, he took off his goggles and laid them to one side. Naked he sat cross-legged on the floor, and reached across to touch Cissnei’s shoulder.

            “Hey,” he said.

            She rolled her head towards him, looked up and down his lithe paleness, all bone and sinew and hard, slender muscle. Eyes like a drowsy cat’s. Hair like a crazy firework. A small smile touched her lips. “Hey, yourself,” she murmured. “You’re kind of hot, you know that? For a skinny-ass guy.”

            “You look ridiculous in that suit,” he said tenderly. “Come here.”

            She crawled over to him on her hands and knees and sat herself in his lap, face to face, her long legs straddling his waist. With one hand he tugged at the knot of her tie. “It’s a long time since I’ve done _this,” _he laughed, pulling it loose and looping it over her head.  His other hand slipped the jacket from her shoulders, balled it up, and threw it into a corner. Cissnei’s own hands were busy unbuttoning her shirt. She was having a little trouble with the task; her fingers were beginning to tremble again. 

            “That’s better,” he said, when she too was naked. Her auburn hair fell to her shoulders in a mess of tangles.  She was smooth and lean and strong, with small high breasts and a belly like the curve of an ivory spoon. “You’re pretty hot yourself,” he told her, “For a chick with no ass at all.”

            Taking her face between his hands, he kissed her on the mouth for the first time, long and deep and hard, until they were both breathless and broke away gasping for air.

            “Now, this time,” he said hoarsely, running a hand down her quivering flank., “Don’t rush me.”

*

            Next day, Reno was the first to wake. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the drawn curtains. Cissnei lay pressed tightly against him in the narrow bed, her head burrowed into his armpit, her curls tickling his nose. A smile curved her lips.

            _Last night I dreamed of you…_

For a while he lay there quietly, watching her breathe. A strand of hair was caught in the corner of her mouth. He pulled it loose. She sighed, and snuggled down more deeply into sleep.

            …_I was sorry to wake up._

            He was only twenty-two years old, but he had been a Turk long enough to know that no kind of happiness was permanent. You had to take what you could get, while you could get it. Live in the moment, and all that. For now, the thing was to keep the office off their backs. Planting a kiss on Cissnei’s messy parting, he eased himself out from under her, and searched around the room until he found his suit trousers.  Three missed calls – they’d slept right through them – and a dozen text messages, all from Tseng. Reno was pondering whether he could get away with texting Tseng back, when the phone rang loudly in his hand, making him jump.

            Tseng got straight to the point. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

            “I – uh – I left my phone in my room –“ Reno kept his voice down, trying not to wake Cissnei. “Sorry, Boss.”

            “I called the Manager at the reactor. He seems to be unaware of your presence in Nibelheim. Then I had to call the innkeeper.” Tseng’s tone dropped ten degrees, from merely cold to frostbitten. “He told me you’ve been _sleeping all day_.”

            _Shit, shit_. _Think fast, Reno. _“Not me, Boss. Ciss. She, uh – she got food poisoning. Rabbit stew. Awful crap. I didn’t touch it.  I had to stay up all night looking after her. Man, you should have seen her hurl. I thought she was going to chuck up her own kidneys – “

            “All right, thank you, Reno. I get the picture. How is she now?”

            “Oh, she’s fine. She’s, uh, sleeping.  I’ll see if I can get her to eat something later, and then we should be good to go tomorrow.”

            “All right. Call me in the morning. And remember time is of the essence. If Nibelheim’s a dead end, we need to know that as soon as possible.”

            “Understood, Boss. Will do.”

            Tseng hung up. Reno turned back to the bed, to find that Cissnei was awake, smothering her laughter behind her hands.  Her eyes danced. “Food poisoning, huh? Did he believe you?”

            “Ciss, when it comes to lying, you are looking at the master.”

            “Tseng’s no fool, you know.”

            “Yeah, but he kind of assumes we’re all like him. He’s never broken a rule in his life, and the only thing that would keep him from his mission would be if he was too sick to move. So, yeah, I think he bought it.”

            “Good,” Cissnei smiled.

            The tense aggression that had filled her these last few days was gone. Her eyes had lost their edginess.  She looked happy, and at peace. _I did that, _thought Reno. _I put that smile on her face…._

“Oh, Reno, just look at you,” she chided. “I can count every one of your ribs. What am I going to do with you?” She sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.  He made a move towards her, but she laughed and shook her head. “First things first. Let’s get you something to eat. I’m not having you faint on me.  And after all that _food poisoning_, I’m starving.”

            She took a fresh suit and shirt out of her suitcase.  Reno put on the clothes he’d been wearing yesterday. Barefoot, they went down the stairs to the front desk, and rang the bell for the innkeeper.

            “So, you’re up at last,” said the man, coming in from the back room. “Are you two here on holiday, then? Nice romantic getaway.  By the way, someone called asking about you – “

            “I know,” Reno interrupted. “Unfortunately, my colleague here was very sick last night and neither of us got much sleep. If anyone asks, you can tell them that. And if anyone else calls for us, tell them we’re out.” Reaching into his jacket, Reno took out his wallet, counted off five hundred-gil notes, and laid them on the counter. “Out _working_,” he added.

            “No problem,” nodded the innkeeper.  It wasn’t often that Turks came prowling round these parts, but he’d heard enough about them to know he’d just struck lucky: a bribe was infinitely preferable to a threat.

            “Have someone bring us up some sandwiches on a tray,” said Reno.

            “And a bottle of your best wine,” added Cissnei.

            “You can leave it outside the door,” Reno told him. “Just knock.”

*

            Halfway through the following day, Reno was sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette, and Cissnei was dozing, her head pillowed against his bare thigh, when she suddenly opened her eyes and said, “You know, we really should go to the reactor tomorrow.”

            “OK,” he said. “We’ll get up early and walk there.”

            The next day they got up some time after noon, and set off at around four o’clock. Although they told each other they were heading for the reactor, both knew they had no intention of going there.  They did not even bother to wear their guns.  Their feet found a path which took them around the side of the old Shinra mansion, through a walled herb garden run to seed and weeds, and into a hillside forest of pine trees, where the fallen needles made a carpet under their feet. Cissnei picked an armful of mushrooms; Reno made a fire. They baked her mushrooms on hot stones and ate them, burning their tongues, taking bites between kisses, until the kisses grew hotter and the mushrooms were forgotten.

             “Do you think anyone saw us?” Cissnei giggled, as they wandered slowly back to the inn in the moonlight.

            “Don’t know,” Reno grinned, his teeth a flash of white. “And don’t really care.”

*

            On the evening of the fourth day, Cissnei said, “We can’t stall Tseng forever. He’ll get suspicious soon. We need to do something that looks like work.  Why don’t we go check out the old mansion tomorrow?”

            “Whatever you want,” he replied, running his finger down the delicate undulations of her spine.

She twisted under his hand.  "You know what I want," she smiled, pulling his mouth down to hers.

*

            Mid-morning of the fifth day found them standing fully dressed and armed outside the iron-bound doors of the mansion. “Is it locked?” she asked.

             Reno gave the door a push. It swung open, squealing on rusty hinges. They stepped over the threshold into the stone-flagged hall. The first thing Reno noticed was the light – white, dusty light, falling down on them through smeared panes of leaded glass.  A wide wooden staircase curved upwards in front of them, rising to a landing that stretched the width of the hall. More stairs went up from the landing to a second-floor hallway bridging the east and west wings.  Reno’s gaze kept travelling upwards until it reached the ceiling, three stories over his head, and the cobwebbed chandelier that hung there.

            “Haunted house, huh?” said Cissnei. “Come on, Red, let’s see if we can find any ghosts.” 

            Their crepe soled Turk boots made no sound as they trod across the flagstones. But when Reno put his foot on the lowest step of the stairs, it creaked, and at once four curious creatures, like pallid, skirted pumpkins with blank, dorky faces, flew from under the stairs and hovered in the air above them. Cissnei nearly jumped out of her skin. “Ghosts!” she screamed.

            Reno had already pulled out his gun. “They’re monsters,” he said. “Just shoot them.”

            Four bullets dispatched the creatures. Cissnei holstered her gun and asked, “Do you think there’s any more?”

            “What? ‘Ooo, ghosts’?” he teased.

            She punched his arm. “You – shut up.”

            Over by the window she found a letter.  “What’s it say?” asked Reno.  “It’s hard to read,” she answered. “It must be decades old. The paper’s so dry it’s crumbling, and the ink’s faded. Something about a nosy Turk in the basement?”

            “Hey, maybe it means the Chief.  He probably worked here when he was young. When the lab was still up and running.”

            “And something about a game, I think.”

            “Hide and seek,” Reno grimaced, looking around at the flyblown windows, the peeling wallpaper, the balding carpet.

            Cissnei let the paper fall from her hand. “No one’s hiding here now,” she said. “This house is…. dead. Don’t you feel it? I think we’re on a wild goose chase.”

             “Still, we’d better look around now we’re here. You take that corridor on the left, and I’ll check out the rooms on the right. Meet me back here in twenty minutes.”

            “Roger.”

            The first door took him along a corridor to a parlour, over-furnished in the style of half a century ago: big table, armchairs, a thick rug on the floor, and tall dark bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes. One of the books lay open on the table, next to a teacup in a saucer. Dust covered everything.

            Behind the second door he found two more pumpkin monsters floating in the middle of an old-fashioned kitchen. He shot them, had a look at the pot-bellied coal range, tried the tap in the deep porcelain sink (it rattled, but no water came out), and went through a further door into a larder packed with crates. Here, too the layers of dust had lain undisturbed for years.

            He went round the walls, tapping them with the butt of his EMR, but they were solid. No secret passageways. He paused for a second when he heard three gunshots, then realised that Cissnei had probably come across more of the monsters.

            Well, his side of the house had drawn a blank: there was no sign of any human activity, and nowhere for any human to hide. He went back to the hall. From a far doorway the sound of an out-of-tune piano being played very badly reached his ears.  He followed the music, and came into a sunlit ballroom, its windows draped with yellowing muslin curtains. A black grand piano stood in the right corner.  Cissnei was poking at its keys with two fingers, playing chopsticks.

            To his left was a round table. Reno sat down in one of the chairs, put his feet up on the white tablecloth, and lit a cigarette.

            “Why’d they build this mansion here, anyway?” he wondered. “Is this, like, the Shinra ancestral pile? How old do you reckon it is, Ciss?”

            “Centuries,” she said. “I’m guessing they bought it when they built the reactor. It was probably company housing for the scientists.”

            “Yeah,” said Reno, thinking of the books piled everywhere. “That stands to reason. Hey, Ciss?”

            “Uh-huh?” she replied, making a chord with middle C, E and G.

            “You must have got to know Lazard pretty well, all that time you worked with him.”

            “Uh-huh,” she said guardedly, in a tone that clearly wondered, _where is this leading?_

“Why d’you think he did it? Why’d he turn on Shinra? I know SOLDIER’s in a mess, but it’s not like he was ever going to have to take the rap for it, being the Old Man’s son and everything.  I would have thought he had a pretty cushy number. Why’d he throw it all away?”

            “He hates his father,” she said, fingering another chord, black notes mixed with white, a minor key.

            “That makes two of them. And Rufus hates Lazard.”

            “And Lazard hates Rufus,” Cissnei finished. “Happy families.”

            “So what’s his plan, him and Hollander?”

            “I have no idea,” she said, closing the piano.

            “Where do you think he is, really?”

            “I can’t even begin to guess. Lazard plays his cards very close to his chest. He was always… uncomfortable with his position. Did you ever read any of those emails he used to send round? The ones about the dark shadows of Shinra? I couldn’t help making fun of them. They were just begging to be spoofed.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “ Zack would get so annoyed. He took them so seriously… ”

            Reno wasn’t having any of that. Crushing the half-smoked cigarette underfoot, he loped across to the piano, bent down, and kissed her long and hard, stroking her neck and her breasts until she put her arms around him with a sigh and began to return his kiss with equal enthusiasm.

            Later, as they were putting their clothes back on, he said, “I don’t want to hear about the past, OK, Ciss? To me it doesn’t matter.”

            “You brought the subject up."

    “Yeah, well…. You’re here with me now. That’s all I care about.”

    “Yes,” she said, “I am. Let’s go take a look around upstairs.”

*

            Room with a locked safe. Reno spent fifteen minutes trying to crack the combination. “Forget it,” said Cissnei at last. “If he’s hiding in there, he’ll have suffocated by now.”

            Reno gave the safe a parting kick, and they went back to the corridor.

*

            Round greenhouse room. Some of the pots contained nothing but earth; others held flourishing overgrown cacti in danger of snapping under the weight of their own top-heaviness. Leaf skeletons and mice droppings lay scattered across the floor. 

            “This room smells of death,” said Cissnei. “Let’s leave.”

*

            Room with a wardrobe, three carved wooden beds, and a thin carpet patterned in cream and brown.  Reno opened the wardrobe and found a black SOLDIER uniform. Hastily he pushed it out of sight and closed the door. “Nothing in here,” he said.

            She was standing by the window with her arms crossed, looking down at the pine woods. He came over and put his hands up under her shirt, nuzzling her hair. “Three beds,” he murmured in her ear. “Which one d’you want to try first?”

*

            Several hours later, they stood in a small back room containing a table, a chair, and more bookcases. Reno did his routine, going round each wall and tapping it.  “Nothing.”

            “Wild goose chase, I’m telling you,” said Cissnei.

            They passed through some sort of antechamber into what was clearly the master bedroom, with a big double bed pushed under the windows. Sunset filled the room with a burning light. Reno threw himself onto the bed’s green and red checked coverlet, folding his arms behind his head.

            “You know what we should do, Ciss?” he said. “We should make love in every room in this house.”

            “Is that what we’ve been doing?” she murmured, as if to herself.

            He heard her; she probably meant that he should. But he wasn’t ready to have this conversation yet.  So he pretended he’d heard nothing, and held out his hand for her to join him.

            Cissnei shook her head and laughed. “You are indefatigable.”

            “What’s that mean?”

            She came to sit beside him. “Don’t you ever wear out?”

            “Dunno,” he grinned, unzipping her trousers, “But it’s fun trying.”

*

            “There’s a door here,” she said later, standing by the curved stone wall at the other end of the room. “Damn. It’s locked.”

            “I can pick that. Got a hairpin?”

            “Reno. Do I look like the kind of girl who wears hairpins?”

            “Ah,” he laughed. “Good point.” Taking his toolknife from his back pocket, he inserted the pick in the lock and worried it gently from side to side until he felt the pins lift.  The door slid back, revealing a stone staircase spiralling down into a well of darkness.

            The sun had set; the colours of day were fading fast.  They took out their flashlights and began the steep descent, keeping their right hands on the wall to stay oriented. Halfway down, Cissnei looked over her shoulder at him and said, “Are we being incredibly stupid, climbing down to a secret crypt in a haunted house just as night falls?”

            “The old lab’s down here.  We have to check it out.”

            At the bottom of the staircase was a cellar, with a ladder disappearing into a hole.  The two Turks climbed down the ladder and found themselves in a tunnel roughly carved from the living rock, just tall enough to stand up in.  Dangling lengths of chains had been riveted to the rock face. Several broken skeletons lay scattered along the tunnel floor. Reno tripped over a yellowed thigh bone, and kicked it aside.

            “Well,” he said, “_These _guys aren’t Shinra.”

            “They lived centuries ago,” Cissnei opined. “Another age.”

            To their left they found an arched wooden door. Reno tapped on it, then pushed it open a crack, shining his flashlight inside. Cissnei craned her neck to see. It was a small room, like a wine cellar, musty and cold. Heaps of skulls had been piled in the corners. In the centre of the room were five coffins.

            “I don’t care if Lazard _is_ hiding in one of those things,” Cissnei shuddered. “I am not going in there. Shut the door, Reno, quick. Let’s finish searching the facility and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

            They passed through an octagonal room filled with books stacked carelessly on the floor. All sorts of scientific equipment - bunsen burners, retorts, flasks, rubber tubes, petrie dishes – were gathering dust on shelves. From here the passage led to a library, and on from the library to a room that felt jarringly modern after so much dust and lace and antiquity. It had a stone floor and bare brick walls, several examination tables, a bank of outdated computers, various mystery machines, and six specimen tanks of the kind Reno recognised all too well. Hojo had the same tanks in his labs on the 67th floor; AVALANCHE had had them at their base near Icicle Inn.

            He and Cissnei made a careful search, but found nothing.

            “Total waste of time,” said Cissnei. “Still, I suppose we had to tick it off our list.  But Lazard’s really too smart to come here. It was bound to be the first place we’d look.”

            She took out her phone.

            “What are you doing?” he asked.

            “I’m calling the manager at the reactor, asking him to send us down some chocobos tomorrow. We have to go there sooner or later.  And Reno, listen,” she put a hand on his arm. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but while we’re there, could you please, please, please keep your hands off me? It’s not that I don’t like it,” she added quickly. “But we need to try to be a bit more discrete. You don’t want to ruin everything, do you?”

*

            In the evening of the following day, they had a fight.

            They’d gone up to the reactor, talked to the staff, and discovered nothing of any use.  Constrained by the classified nature of their investigation, they were unable to refer to Lazard by name or show his photo to the people they questioned, and so had to confine themselves to a general inquiry. They learned that monster sightings had gone up significantly since the previous year (the Manager showed them his bar charts) and that the creatures were becoming bolder, but as for any suggestion that unauthorized human personnel might have gained entrance to the facility  – absolutely not. The rest of the workers told the same story. 

            Tired at the end of this long, unproductive day, they rode back to the inn without talking much. Reno was just stepping out of the bath and wrapping a towel around his waist, when Cissnei’s phone rang.

            “Hey, Boss, how are you?” she said. “Yes, I’m fine now, thank you. Yes we did. Today. No, nothing, just a dead end. That’s what we think. Yes, if anything comes to me, I’ll tell you. Yes, Reno’s fine. Well, you know him, sir. He doesn’t account to me for his movements. Actually, between you and me,” she lowered her voice to a fake whisper, “I think he might have a girl.”

            “What?” cried Reno. “What are you doing?”

            Cissnei shushed him with a frown. “Yes, that’s him, sir. He just came in. Tomorrow. I’ll tell him. Understood. See you then. Bye, Boss.”

            She clicked the phone shut, and turned to Reno. “He wants us back in Midgar tomorrow.”

            “Fuck,” he snarled, balling his fists. “Fuck. Shit.”

            “It’s been a week. We’ve been lucky to have that much.”

            He grabbed her hand. “Fuck them. Let’s run away.”

            “What?”

            “If AVALANCHE can hide, so can we.”

            She snatched her hand back. “Don’t be so stupid. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I _like_ my job. And what about you, what else could you do? Come on, don’t say such idiotic things. We have to be sensible.”

            “You don’t care,” he accused her.

            “Of course I care! How would flapping my hands and acting like I’ve just been shot in the head show I care?  We need a plan, fuckwit.  I’m trying to think, is all.”

            He ran his hands through his hair. “And what the hell was that shit to Tseng? ‘Oh, you know Reno. Oh, I think he has a girl.’ Is that part of your plan?”

            “Yeah, actually, it is.”

            “We’re just going to walk in and tell him? Suicide mission?”

            “No.  We can’t go back together. I’ll go back. You’ll have to stay here.”

            “Oh yeah, brilliant. ‘You know Reno, he’s such an idiot he got lost on his way from the inn to the chopper’. Tseng’ll buy that. Love it already.”

            Cissnei too was beginning to get angry. “Look, shut up,” she snapped. “We can’t go back together. I can’t walk into that office with you tomorrow like nothing’s happened. I can’t do it. One of us has to stay behind and it makes more sense if it’s you. That’s why I told him you’ve got a girl. I’ll say you stayed behind to take some leave and be with her. He’ll believe that.”

            Reno shook his head. “Why me and not you? You don’t trust me not to do something stupid, is that it?”

            “No! -  But I’ve set you up for it now, so it has to be you.”

            “Fucking hell,” he breathed. “You’ve got the whole thing planned out, haven’t you? How long have those little wheels in your mind been turning?”

            “One of us had to come up with something to cover our butts. And I guess it had to be the one who doesn’t think with their _dick_,” she spat.

            “I didn’t hear you complaining earlier.” He folded his arms. “I’m not doing it, Ciss. I’m not letting you go back there on your own.  No way.  Whatever we do, we do it together.”

            “Just back the fuck off, Reno, can’t you?” she exclaimed. “Just – stop crowding me! Listen! Listen to me! Ever since I came home you’ve been acting like you own me. You don’t own me. Nobody owns me!” She took a deep breath, and continued, “How can we go back to the office together when you can’t keep your hands off me?  How long would it be before everyone knows? Before the Chief finds out? You’ve got to back off a little. Sometimes you make me feel like I can’t breathe. Please – try to understand. I just – I just need some space.  I need to be alone for a while. I’ve been alone so much this last year, I…. “

            He was trying to listen to her, he really was. He was trying as hard as he could to understand what she was saying.  But it came down to this one thing. She wanted to go. And she didn’t want him to go with her.

            “… Being with you is so intense,” she went on. “I’m getting worn out. I need some time alone.  I need to go back to Midgar and have some space to think, so I can work out how to manage this. There might be a way, if we take it slowly…”

            He couldn’t force her to stay with him. It wasn’t his style. And she’d fight him if he tried: she’d claw her way loose.

            “Please,” she said softly, coming from behind to put her arms around his waist. She laid her head between his shoulder-blades and held him tight. “Please, please, believe that I know best. Let me do this the way I want. Please.”

            He had to let her go, and hope.

            “Please, Reno,” she kissed his jaw. “Please,” she kissed his ear, “Please,” she murmured, nibbling his neck. “You have to trust me. It’ll all be OK. Just trust me.” She ran her hands along the hard flatness of his stomach, and slid them down under his towel, her teeth gently biting his shoulder.

            He would have done anything for her then. Killed. Died. Anything.

*

            In the moonlight her skin had a pearly sheen. He walked his fingers up her right arm, along the line of her shoulder, and down her slim back to the two little dimples, like thumbprints in cream, denting the flesh just above each buttock.

            “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

            “I know I am,” she replied, a note of something like sadness, or wryness, or perhaps simply tiredness, in her voice.  “It’s my job.”

            “Hey, big head,” he slapped her bottom. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like you’re _the_ most gorgeous chick I’ve ever had.”

            “Oh really?” she smiled. “So who was she, then?”

            “Her name was, uh, Amanda. Yeah, Amanda. Whoa! She had legs that went up to her armpits and tits like melons.”

            “Mmm,” Cissnei giggled. “She sounds…well-proportioned.”

            He laughed at that, throwing himself down beside her, and pushed her hair away to look closely into her face.  Huge golden eyes fringed with dark lashes; full-lipped mouth; narrow delicate nose; her face itself a serene oval, the loveliest thing on the planet.  When he was with her, nothing else mattered. Without her, life was empty.

            _So this is what it means_, he realized in astonishment. _It means everything._

            “Cissnei,” he said slowly, “I have to tell you something.”

            “What?” she murmured. She was nearly asleep.

            “What I said before, that I didn’t love you? It was a lie. I do love you.”

            “I know.” Stretching out a languid arm, she took hold of his hand, brought it to her mouth, and kissed it. “I love you too, Red. Whatever happens, remember that.”

*

            They rose at dawn, showered, dressed, checked out, and carried their luggage to the helicopter.  Cissnei said, “Are you sure you want me to take you to Rocket Town?”

            “I don’t want to stay here without you. It’ll be easy to get a plane or something from Rocket Town. And nobody’ll know me. I’ve never been there.”

            “I have,” she said. “I was there for a while earlier this year. You should look up my friend, Cid Highwind.”

            “The fighter pilot?”

            “He’s an astronaut in training now. I think you two would have a lot in common.”

            The rocket itself was visible from miles away; they saw it as soon as they came over the mountain ridge, thrusting up into the sky like a –

            “Big bloody dick,” said Cissnei. “Man penetrates space. The ultimate orgasm.”

            “Hey, cool it,” said Reno. “A guy’s allowed to dream.”

            She set him down in a field outside the town. “I’ll call you!” she shouted over the rotors. “It’ll just be a couple of days! Don’t fret!”

            The helicopter leapt back into the air and whoop-whooped away, leaving Reno feeling more at a loss – more lost – than he could ever remember being.  He had no chopper…he had no partner…he was wearing civvies…. All he had to remind him of himself were the guns under his armpits and the goggles on his brow. The mag-rod was stowed in his suitcase.  He and Cissnei had agreed that he should lie low until she told him it was safe to return to Midgar… 

            If that day ever came. He’d done a lot of things in his time to wind Tseng up, but he’d never pulled a stunt like this before, refusing a direct order to return to HQ.  That was right up there in Charlie’s league. Unfortunately, unlike Charlie, he, Reno, wasn’t a legend in his own time. 

            He lugged his suitcase into town and checked in at the inn. The bar seemed quiet. He went across the road and wasted time in the gun shop for a while, then took a stroll through the town to see what it had to offer.  The old town itself was not much more than a few buildings gathered around a square; the real business of Rocket Town took place in the fields beyond, where rows of temporary staff housing had sprung up around the launch site, looking like cardboard boxes mushrooming in the grass.  The action was probably livelier over there, and a month ago Reno would have hurried to check it out. Now he just wasn’t interested.  Bored, he scuffed his way back to the inn, and settled down in the TV lounge to watch re-runs of old comedies.

            Round about five pm, pretty much bang on the time Reno had predicted, Tseng called.

            “Just where the hell are you, Reno?”

            “Taking a holiday. Ciss get back OK?”

            “You have no more holiday entitlement.”

            “What about last year’s – “

            “It doesn’t roll over.  I’m warning you, I can’t overlook this. You are exposing yourself to the most severe disciplinary measures – “

            “Oh, no, the signal’s going – You’re breaking up – “

            Reno turned his phone off.  Then, feeling stupid, he turned it back on. How could Ciss call him if his phone was off? It started ringing again, but caller ID showed it was Tseng.  The Boss didn’t give up easily.  He kept on calling, every five minutes, for about an hour, and Reno kept on resisting the urge to answer. Finally, his phone fell silent.

            Soon afterwards, Cissnei called. “How are you, Reno? Are you OK?” Her voice was a whisper.

            “Where are you, Ciss?”

            “In the girls’ toilet.  Tseng’s so angry. He thinks I’m in cahoots with you.”

            “Like you said, he’s no fool.”

            “It’s skin of our teeth time. Listen, I wouldn’t put it past him to trace my calls, so I’m not going to call you for a couple of days.”

            “Ciss, no – “

            “You should disable your phone, too. Pull the battery out.”

            “But what if – “

             “I’ve got to go. Reno, please don’t worry. It’ll all work out. Just look after yourself. _Eat_.“

            “But Ciss – “

            She hesitated. “Be strong, OK? For me.” And she hung up.

            That night he missed her so badly he couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night he went down to the bar. It was locked, so he broke in.  Bourbon had lost some of its potency for him, but vodka would still do the trick. He helped himself to a bottle from under the counter and went back to his room. Eventually, as dawn was breaking, he fell into a restless doze.

            When the theft was discovered he had to pay double just to get them off his case, but he didn’t really care.

            By the third day he was so bored that he wandered back to the rocket site and lay down in the meadow to watch the crew work.  He’d been there for a couple of hours when he saw a tall man come striding across the grass, his ragged crew-cut of blond hair held back by a pair of goggles very like Reno’s own.  As the man came closer Reno could see he was in his late thirties, with a lean, weather-beaten face, and hawk eyes.

            “Hey, you,” the man shouted. “Your name Reno, by any chance?”

            Reno sat up. “No.”

            “Are you sure? ‘Coz I just got a call from HQ asking if I’d seen some skinny red-head dude with tattoos on his cheeks and goggles, and you kind of fit the bill.”

            “I know who you mean,” said Reno. “That one’s my twin brother.”

            The man was standing over him now, and he was not amused. “Don’t fuck with me. D’you take me for a fool?”

            “No.” Reno got to his feet, brushing the grass from his jeans. “You’re Cid Highwind, aren’t you? I’m a friend of Cissnei’s.”

            Cid’s stubbled cheeks broke into a smile. “That livin’ doll! How is she?”

            “She – she’s good. She says hi.”

            “Man, she sure set this place on fire. Had half the base crazy about her.  Wasn’t interested in any of them, though. I reckon she was pining away for some sweetheart back in Midgar. Good thing too. She’s the kind of broad guys’ll kill each other over, and I need more trouble here like I need a hole in my fucking head. So, anyway - You a Turk too, not-Reno?”

            “I’m on holiday.”

            “Oh, I get it. Office chasing you to cut your leave short? Fuckin’ slave-drivers, ain’t they? Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. Any friend of Cissnei’s is a friend of mine.  Hey – “ he gestured at the goggles. “You a pilot?”

            “Helicopters.”

            “The Shinra mule,” Cid spat into the grass. “No offense, but if you want to see a real classy thoroughbred you need to come take a look at the airship I’m building out back….”

            Cissnei was right: Cid was an easy guy to get along with.  He showed Reno all over the Highwind, and then took him on a tour of the rocket site, and by the end of the day Reno was happily at work in the bowels of the boosters, wiring fuses and testing connections. It felt good to be busy. The aching longing for Cissnei that threatened to consume him could be held at bay as long as he had something, anything, to keep his mind occupied.  But at night the emptiness of his arms, the coldness of the sheets, the craving he felt for the smell of her hair and the touch of her skin, made him fear he was losing his mind.

            He had to trust her.

            He understood why she couldn’t call. Not on her own phone. But she could have borrowed a friend’s phone and called the inn. She could have borrowed Rude’s phone, or Rosalind’s.

            He needed to stop thinking like that.

            He tried calling her on the inn’s phone, but her phone was out of order.

            He had to trust her, or he would go insane.

            On the fifth day Cid came and squatted down beside him where he was working on the back-up ignition motors.  “Everything OK, not-Reno?” he asked.

            “Sure. Why?”

            “You look… kinda wild-eyed, sometimes.  Here, I got somethin’ for you. Came in the internal mailbag.” Cid reached into his back pocket and took out a postcard of the Shinra Tower.

            Reno began to shake.

            “Thing is,” said Cid, “I think your name _is_ Reno, because this is addressed to Reno, care of me, and this here sure as damn looks like you, don’t it?”

            Holding the card between his forefinger and thumb, Cid turned it round to show Reno the cartoon chibi she had drawn in red ink: tattoos, goggles, spikes of hair sprouting every which way, heavy-lidded almond eyes.

            Under the drawing, she’d written, _I never lied to you_.

            He couldn’t breathe. No – he was going to throw up. Pushing Cid out of the way, he staggered blindly from the rocket into the dazzle of daylight, and vomited onto the grass.  Then he fell to his knees, gasping.

            Cid had come after him, followed by a couple of the technicians. “Get him some water, goddamit,” he heard Cid snap at one of them.

            What was he going to do? He felt like he was flying apart in a hundred different directions.  _I never lied to you_.  What did she mean? She must have said something, something that would make sense of everything, if only he could remember it. What was it, then? What had he missed? What truth had he failed to hear?

            _Don’t feel. Feeling hurts. Think. Think._

_            Call Tseng._

He sat back on his heels, pulled out his phone, and kept hitting the menu button, unable to grasp why it wouldn’t work.

            Cid took it out of his hands. “Battery’s gone. Use mine. What’s the number?”

            “HQ. Extension 481.”

            He could hear the phone ringing in Cid’s hands, and then Tseng’s voice, tinny with distance. “Hullo, who is – “

            “Got someone for you,” said Cid, before passing the phone over.

            “Boss – “

            “Reno? Reno, is that you? Whose number is this? Reno? Are you all right?”

            Reno sucked air deep into his lungs. His head cleared, just a little bit. He said, “Where’s Cissnei?”

            “You’ve got some nerve, calling to ask me that. Where are _you_, is more to the point -”

            “Rocket Town. Boss, you have to tell me, where is she?”

            “What? Cid Highwind told me he hadn’t seen you – “

            “Please, Boss, just tell me – “

            “What the hell are you doing in Rocket Town? No – don’t even bother to answer that, you’ll only spin me some ludicrous farrago of nonsense. Just get yourself back here – “

            “For fuck’s sake, Tseng,” Reno exploded, “Just fucking answer my fucking question for fucking once. Where the fuck is she?  Is she with Zack Fair?”

            For a moment it seemed as if the other end of the line had gone dead.

            “I’m not going to discuss this over the phone,” said Tseng. “You get back here, and then you can tell me exactly what’s been going on and what you know. And if I’m not looking at you with my own two eyes before this day is over, I can promise you, Reno, you will wish you had never been born.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

The hour was closer to dawn than midnight when the plane carrying Reno touched down at the airstrip outside Midgar. Tseng was waiting for him on the runway with a company car. His hard fingers took Reno by the elbow. “Where’s your suit?”

            “I forgot – “

            “You are so far over the line, I don’t know where to start.” He shoved Reno into the passenger seat.  “Get in. And shut up. I’m too angry to talk to you right now.”

            “Just tell me, where’s Cissnei?”

            “I said no talking.”

            “You don’t understand. This can’t wait. “ Reno pressed both hands to his head. “Zack’s not in Midgar right now, is he?  I remember now. He’s gone on furlough.  Is that where she is? She’s with him, isn’t she?”

            “I’m warning you - “

            “Do you even know where she is?”

            “You have no right to question me.”

            In desperation, barely realizing what he was doing, Reno pulled out his gun and pointed it at Tseng’s head. His hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t hold it steady. Tseng merely glanced at him, gave his brief bark of a laugh, and returned his attention to the highway unfurling in their headlights.  After a moment he said, “Put it away, Reno. Before you have an accident. “

            Reno let the gun fall into his lap. Had he really just threatened to shoot _the Boss_? He must be out of his mind. That must be why he felt so dizzy. All the familiar things around him looked strange, wrong: the road, the gun, Tseng’s face, his own hands.  They appeared at once painfully sharp and far away, as if he was looking at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

            “All right,” said Tseng. “To stop you doing anything else so stupid - Yes, Zack Fair is on furlough in Costa, and yes, she’s with him. I sent her there to keep an eye on him, in case Lazard tries to make contact. Now, you tell me why that’s a problem.”

            “God,” Reno breathed out, “You don’t know?”

            Was it possible? Yet Tseng was sitting there so calmly, one hand on the steering wheel, as if nothing Reno might say could surprise him. “What exactly is it that you think I don’t know?” he asked.

            Reno opened his mouth. The words wouldn’t come. Tensing his muscles, he dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands as hard as he could. The pain helped, a little. He tried again. “Cissnei’s in love with Zack. She’s gone to try to get him back.”

            This must have been what Tseng had been expecting him to say, because he didn’t miss a beat as he replied, “I’m afraid you’ve allowed your jealousy to cloud your judgement. You are wrong. On both counts.”

            He sounded so sure.

            Reno wasn’t sure of anything any more. Except this one thing, the thing he’d seen with his own eyes.  The truth he’d had from her mouth. “I’m not wrong. Fuck it, Tseng, you _know_ I’m not wrong - you and the Chief are the ones who set her up for it in the first place. You sent her off to SOLDIER to get inside Zack’s pants so he’d tell her what he knew about Angeal and Genesis. You _know_ she fell in love with him. That’s why the Chief pulled her from the mission.”

            “Who told you that?” asked Tseng.

            “Nobody _told_ me. It was obvious.”

            “You know, Reno, I’ve warned you before not to speculate about other Turks’ missions.  I told you it would get you into trouble. I wish you had listened to me.”

            “I’m not wrong,” Reno almost shouted.

            “Listen to me. Cissnei was never in a relationship with Zack Fair. And we weren’t the ones who pulled her from the mission. Lazard asked us to take her away.”

            “What? Why? Wasn’t he the one who wanted her in the first place?”

            “Well, naturally. She is very beautiful.”

            At these words, it seemed to Reno as if the world took a great lurch sideways.  His dizziness intensified. “What - what do you mean?”

             “Well…. I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now.  The Commander started having suspicions about Lazard several years ago, even before Genesis and Angeal defected.  But Lazard’s very cautious. Very good at hiding things. Including himself, it would now appear. So we needed to get someone inside his guard. The Commander came up with the idea of the Turk-SOLDIER liaison officer.  We did, in fact, need someone in that position.  Our intention was to let Lazard choose whomever he wanted. He chose Cissnei. _He_ was the one who put her on to Zack.”

            “Wait – what?” Reno’s hands clenched. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

            “A simple double-bluff. Lazard wanted to keep his private life hidden from the Old Man.  He encouraged Cissnei to develop the appearance of a relationship with Zack as a smokescreen to conceal her relationship with him.”

            Momentarily robbed of speech, Reno could only stare at his boss in disbelief.  Did Tseng actually think that this claptrap he was spewing with such confidence was _true_?

            _Was_ it true?

            “She was acting under our instructions,” Tseng went on. “We told her to cooperate with whatever Lazard wanted. For a while it seemed to be working. But he trusted nobody, and he knew where her true loyalties lay. In the end, he couldn’t bring himself to open up to her. She wasn’t making any progress, and she pushed a little too… clumsily. He asked us to take her away.”

            Reno’s skull hurt. Like it was cracking up. He clutched his head. “Wait,” he said. His guts had started churning again, making it hard for him to think clearly. “Let me get this straight. Are you saying – she was screwing _both_ of them?”

            Tseng shook his head. “No. Only Lazard. Not Zack – “

            “Are you blind, Tseng? Of course she was screwing Zack. She was _in love_ with Zack. She still is. God. No wonder Director Lazard didn’t find her performance convincing.”

            Reno’s vehemence gave Tseng pause. When he next spoke, a note of uncertainty had come into his voice. “How do you know this?”

            “Because she _told_ me. She said he was the love of her life. He broke her heart when he dumped her for Aerith Gainsborough.  And now she’s alone with him in Costa. And _you_ sent her there. Boss, you are a fucking idiot.”

            For a few moments the only sounds in the car were the smooth hum of the engine and the hiss of the tires on the tarmac.

            “Both of them,” said Reno, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

            He couldn’t stop picturing their hands. The white gloves. The black gloves. Her pearly skin.

             “Oh God. Stop the car. I think I’m going to be sick.”

            Tseng pulled over. At this dark hour, the highway was empty. Reno flung open the door, fell into the roadway, and retched. His empty stomach brought up nothing but strings of bile: bitterness filled his mouth.

            Tseng got out of the car and walked around to stand beside him. The mako streetlamp above their heads bathed them both in its shadowless glare.

            “You two… weren’t working in Nibelheim,” Tseng stated.

            Reno hawked, spat, sat back on his heels. “You just worked that out?”

            “Your feelings are obvious, of course. I was remiss not to see it before. But I hadn’t realized she – reciprocated.”

            “She used me,” Reno gasped, his stomach heaving again.

             Tseng went to the car, got a bottle of water, opened it, and gave it to Reno. Reno swilled his mouth out, then drank in noisy gulps.

            Tseng said, cruelly, “Are you losing your touch, Reno?”

            “Don’t – “

            “She screwed you over, eh?”

            “Shut up.”

            “I believed her, you know, when she told me you’d stayed behind with a girl. I even sent Rude to Nibelheim to get you. That was probably foolish of me, too. He knows, doesn’t he?”

            After a moment’s hesitation, Reno nodded.

            “How long has this been going on?” But Tseng was thinking aloud rather than asking a question, and without waiting for an answer that Reno would not, in any case, have given, he went on, “It can’t have been long. And if what you say about Zack is true…. Yes, I see. It makes sense now. Before you went to Nibelheim, I told her to make sure she came back by the end of the week, because we wanted her to go to Costa with Zack Fair. It must have seemed to her like a golden opportunity.  But you were in the way, weren’t you?  You knew too much.  And you were too involved. She had to figure out a way to neutralize you before you interfered.  And with Roz suddenly out of action, and the Chief assigning you to the Nibelheim mission, everything fell into place.  And she actually persuaded you to go and wait for her in Rocket Town.” Tseng barked a laugh. “She’s a resourceful girl, I’ll give her that.”

            Holding on to the car door, Reno pulled himself to his feet. “You’re enjoying this, you bastard.”

            “Less than you’d think,” Tseng replied. “But you brought it on yourself.  You know the rules. You chose to ignore them. Get in the car.  I’ll take you home. You’ll be seeing the Commander tomorrow morning.”

            Reno didn’t move. He said, “What about Cissnei?”

            “Well, I suppose we’ll have to bring her back now, but I see no immediate cause for alarm. I trust Zack. What’s the worst that could happen? She throws herself at him, and humiliates herself in the process… Which will be painful for her, but hardly a threat to the company.“

            Reno realized that Tseng still wasn’t seeing it.

            He could have kept silent then. But the desire for revenge had lodged like a hot coal in his throat. He had to spit it out, and he hoped – god, he hoped – it would _burn_ her:

            “Don’t you get it, Boss? She’s gone to Costa to tell him the truth about Aerith Gainsborough.”

            Tseng froze.  In the cold lamplight Reno saw the blood drain from his face. The possibility that Cissnei might do such a thing had obviously never crossed his mind.

            “No,” said Tseng, “She wouldn’t.”

            “What other ammo’s she got? She’s probably told him already.”

            “But - but she knows that would be putting Aerith’s life in danger.”

            “D’you think she gives a fuck? Shit, Tseng, don’t you know _anything_ about women?”

            Tseng threw his head back and ran a hand over his hair, his eyes searching through the sky as if he might find there something to contradict Reno’s certainty that Cissnei had betrayed them both.  To the east dawn was a seam of pale light between the clouds and the broken horizon. When Tseng looked back at Reno, he had come to a decision.

            “You drive,” he said, putting the keys in Reno’s hand. “And try to keep your mind on what you’re doing.”

            As soon as they were moving again, he took out his phone and made a call. It rang and rang. Nobody answered.

            “Cissnei?” said Reno.

            “Just drive. And hurry.” Tseng dialed another number. “Knox, it’s me. I need you to fly with me to Costa. Get up to the pad. I’m calling them now.”

            Reno said, “I’ll fly you.”

            Tseng ignored him. He called the helipad and ordered them to have a chopper ready to take off in ten minutes.

            “I’m going with you,” said Reno.

            “Put your foot down.”

            The tires burnt a trail of rubber onto the tarmac as they sped down the ramp into the Shinra building’s basement car park. Tseng leapt from the car while it was still moving and sprinted for the stairway that led to the lobby. Reno jumped out, leaving the engine running, and ran after him.  The reception area was empty except for a couple of guards. Reno caught up with his boss at the foot of the mezzanine stairs and grabbed his arm. “I said I’m going with you.”

            “No,” said Tseng.

            “Yes – “

            “Don’t make this worse for yourself – “

            Reno did not want to fight Tseng. His one thought was to get to Cissnei. But Tseng was in his way. He tried to shove him aside. Tseng fell backwards against the wall; his right leg lashed out, kicking Reno in the knees. Reno grabbed onto the banister to steady himself.  Coiling back his fist, he aimed for Tseng’s nose – but he was wrung out and he’d had nothing to eat all day. He was too slow. Tseng blocked the move with his right forearm and punched Reno hard on the cheekbone. Reno crumpled.

            Dazed by the blow, he was only dimly aware of Tseng bending over him. Next thing he knew, his face was being turned from side to side, Tseng’s ungentle fingers probing for any broken bones.

            “You’ll be all right,” Tseng told him. “You need some food. You need some rest. Go home.”

            “Home?”

            “The Commander expects you in his office at ten. You should clean up first. Get changed.”

            _Get changed? _wondered Reno. _That’s a good one. Wish I could. Change out of this skin I’m in. It’s barely holding me together. Can’t he see?_

Perhaps Tseng did see. He lingered another moment at Reno’s side, rested a gloved hand on his shoulder. When he spoke again, his tone was different, warmer. Almost – compassionate? “Just wait here. I’ll send someone down for you.”

            “No….”

            But Tseng was already gone, running up the stairs towards the elevator.

            Reno remained slumped where he had fallen.  A bruise was forming on his cheek. His face hurt, and he knew it, but he couldn’t feel it enough to care.  He was hungry and exhausted. Did it matter? Why? Sleep, food, pain: these things were only skin-deep.

            Some far away part of his mind registered the sound of the guard’s voice saying, “Hey, you there – “

            He felt numbed. Punch-drunk.

            Stupid. _Stupid_. How could he have been so stupid?

            She had used him. And he’d allowed her to. He’d given his fucking _permission_. _Hey, what are friends for_?

            “How did you get in here?” The guard’s voice was growing louder.

            _I dreamed of you. Yes. I wanted you. I never lied. I love you too._

_            Then why did you do this to me? _

“What are you doing? “ exclaimed the guard, “Don’t touch that – “

            _But I told you, I don’t love you like that. Not like – him._

A gun fired.

            Reno’s head jerked up, eyes snapping into focus.

            The sound of a revving engine came from the showroom behind the reception. By its tone he knew at once it was the Hardy-Daytona. Next instant, the bike itself burst through the showroom doors and skidded in a circle across the marble floor, slamming against the side of the stairs. There it rested for a moment, shuddering from the vibrations of its weapons-grade engine. Reno got a clear look at the rider – the thief: a whey-faced boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, with a hard mouth and stoned eyes, dressed in zippered black jeans and an old army great-coat.

            The guard was leaning against the showroom doorpost, clutching his bleeding gut. “You! Turk! Reno!” he gasped. “He’s stealing the bike! Stop him!”

            The thief tossed his hair from his eyes, hauled the bike upright, and gunned the engine.  It began to move, but not as fast as Reno could move: he calculated the trajectory, crossed the floor, and jumped onto the back of the bike just before it shot through the front door of the Shinra Building, carrying thief and Turk outside into the dawn light.

            The thief kicked back with one foot. “Get the fuck off,” he snarled. “It’s mine.”

            “I don’t think so,” said Reno, trying to reach under the kid’s arms to grab hold of the controls. The bike careered madly down the road, veering from side to side. They crashed through some garbage cans, caught the edge of one of the lids and bounced into the air.

            “You fucker!” screamed the boy. “You’ll kill us!”

            “Who cares?” said Reno.

            Tires squealing, the bike took the corner into Fountain Square at top speed and spun out of control.  A few early risers, out for their morning stroll, shrieked and scattered for cover.  The boy fell off first; Reno threw himself forward, yanked the wheel around, and hit the brakes. But the bike was going too fast. Reno bailed, landing on his feet just as the bike hit the edge of the fountain. It turned over and crashed into the water, hissing and sparking. Reno was drenched with the spray.

            A bullet smacked into the wall behind him. He looked round. The kid had pulled a pistol from his greatcoat and was pointing it, not very accurately, at Reno’s head. Again he fired; again, he missed. Reno walked over to him, broke his wrist with a blow, and took the gun. “Bitch,” he said, “Did you just try to kill me?”

            The boy’s mouth twisted in pain. “Fuck off and die,” he wheezed.

            “No,” said Reno. “You.”

            He flipped the gun round in his hand, and with its butt cracked the kid a blow to the back of his skull that knocked him to his knees.  A second blow laid him flat on the pavement. Too easy. “C’mon,” Reno muttered, kicking him in the ribs. “Fight me.” The kid groaned and tried to push up on his good arm. “C’mon, bitch,” Reno urged him. The boy flailed a fist in Reno’s direction, then flopped again, gasping.  Reno laughed. “Don’t be so weak, bitch.”

            Turning the boy over, Reno took hold of his coat lapels and dragged him towards the fountain, leaving a thin trail of blood in their wake.  He pushed the boy’s head into the cold water. The boy’s eyes and mouth flew open and he struggled to break free of Reno’s grip. Reno took hold of him by the hair and yanked his head up. The boy gagged, spitting out water. His eyes were dark with pain and fear and anger. “Bitch,” said Reno again, almost conversationally. “Where’d you get the idea you could fuck with Shinra?

        From somewhere the thief found the strength to break loose from Reno’s grip long enough to lunge forward and head-butt him. Reno’s head snapped back on his spine; his jaws clashed together, and he felt a molar crack. Lithely he jumped up, straddling the boy’s body, and with both hands dug his fingers deep into the roots of the boy’s thick reddish-brown hair. “Bitch,” he hissed, shoving the boy’s head under the water with such force that it cracked against the bottom of the fountain. Then he pulled him out, and pushed him in again, and pulled him out, and pushed him in again, and he no longer knew that he was shouting out loud as he did so “Bitch! Bitch!”

            Suddenly people were swarming all over him – blue uniforms pulling his prey from his hands; a strong pair of arms wrapping round him, pinning his own to his sides. He tried to fight them off. “Stop it!” a woman’s voice cried. “It’s me – Mink! Stop it, Reno – you’re killing him! He’s just a kid!”

            For another moment or two he struggled against her, but she was as strong as he was, and she was fresh, while he…. Why was he fighting, when he had already lost?

            “We don’t do this,” Mink exclaimed passionately. “We don’t kill like this. This is not what we do.”

            It was over, anyway. The grunts had put the body, alive or dead, on a stretcher and were carrying it away. The water in the fountain had turned pink. Reno’s trousers, his shirt, even his socks, were sticky with blood. Clumps of hair and scalp had wedged under his fingernails.

            “Let’s go,” said Mink.

             Go? What was she talking about? Go where? Nowhere, anywhere: it was all the same. Here or there, this fountain or the office, Midgar or Rocket Town, life or death… What difference did it make, when Cissnei was not waiting for him in any of these places?

            She was never coming back. He would never see her again.  He knew it, in his bones, in his gut, in his heart. She was gone.

            Reno sat down on the edge of the fountain, put his bruised head in his bloody hands, and cried.

            Mink had no idea why he was crying, or what had filled him with such rage.  Yet the sight of him made her own eyes burn. Of all of them, he was the last one she would have expected to see break down like this. Seating herself beside him, she only hesitated for a moment. Then she put her arms around his shoulders, and to comfort him murmured the nonsense everyone utters at times like these: it’s OK, don’t worry, everything will be all right.

 


	8. Punishments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno comes to terms with Cissnei's treachery, and both Zack and Aerith turn to Tseng for advice

            Thinking it over a week or so later, Tseng came to the conclusion that their first mistake had been their willingness to believe that Genesis was dead. No one had seen his body with their own eyes. They had simply assumed that what ought to be, must be - always an unwise thing to do, as the recent events in Junon had amply proved. For on the same day that Reno had returned from Rocket Town, and Tseng had flown with Knox to Costa to bring back Cissnei, a very-much-alive Genesis had overrun Junon with a platoon of clones and sprung Profession Hollander from his interrogation cell, despite the best efforts of Zack and the Turks to stop him.

            Tseng blamed Cissnei for this, too – possibly unfairly, but he felt it was her fault he had taken his eye off the ball. He had found her in Costa lounging on the beach in a skimpy bikini, watching Zack go through his morning exercises – Zack had looked almost relieved when Tseng appeared, an irony which, under other circumstances, might have afforded the Turk a degree of amusement.  Cissnei had kept her cool, though; he had to admire her for that, even though she must have realized as soon as she saw him that her gamble had failed.

            The surprise attack by a dozen Genesis clones had bought her a little time. Zack in his swimming trunks had fended the clones off with a rolled beach umbrella, and then Commander Veld had called, summoning them all to Junon, and so Cissnei’s punishment had had to be deferred until the situation there was brought under control. 

            But now a week had passed, and she was gone. Gone for good this time, their brass-knuckled butterfly. The Commander had dealt with her. Where she had been sent, what she would do now, Tseng wasn’t told, and he didn’t ask.  It was easier not to think about her – or if he must think of her (and he seemed unable to help himself) then it was not her husky laugh that he should remember, or that smile that brought sunshine into a room; he must forget her charm and her courage, forget the childlike way she cocked her head to one side when she listened, and the light that shone in her golden eyes when she took aim with her shuriken. Better to remember only that she was a liar and a manipulator, who had disobeyed her orders, deceived her partner, and betrayed the deepest of company secrets in pursuit of her own selfish ends.  She had put herself first, and an innocent girl’s life was now at risk as a result.

            Tseng could not forgive her for that.

            As for Reno… as soon as the stripes on his back healed, the Commander banished him to work on the bunker deep inside the plate. Reno was – not obedient, exactly – not resigned… _Apathetic_ was the word Tseng eventually arrived at. He did what he was ordered to do without comment or complaint, and this, in itself, was a cause for anxiety. For several days Tseng found excuses to be down in the bunker with him, half-afraid that he might try to blow his own brains out. 

            But Reno was a survivor. As they all were.

            He had brought this misfortune on himself, of course, by flagrantly breaking the very rules that had been established for his own protection. One ought not to feel compassion for him, nor to wish, in any private corner of one’s being, that things could have somehow turned out differently. Love, for a Turk, was a self-indulgence that could only ever end in disaster. Look at Rude – at Knox – at Rosalind – at Natalya and Charlie.  Yet still they failed to learn.

            And there were times when Tseng himself wasn’t sure whether he pitied them, or envied them.

            He tried to express something of what he felt to Reno, even though he knew he was clumsy with kind words.

            “Typical of me, though, eh?” Reno replied. “What a sucker.”

            “That’s not what I meant.”

            “I know. Look, can’t you just bugger off and leave me to wallow in my self-pity for a while? I won’t drown, if that’s what you’re afraid of.  The puddle’s pretty shallow.”

            Turning away from Tseng, Reno picked up an acetylene blowtorch, pulled his goggles over his eyes, and set to work soldering together two lengths of copper piping.  Tseng glanced around. Over in the far corner he saw a shinrafoam mattress, covered by an old sleeping bag, lying on the concrete floor. Beside it was a bottle of what looked like vodka, three-quarters empty.

            Raising his voice above the roar of the blowtorch, he shouted at Reno, “That boy Tys, your bike thief – the doctors tell me he’s out of danger.”

            Reno went on working as if he had not heard.

            “He says he took the bike for a dare,” Tseng pressed on. “But my guess is, it was an initiation of some sort. From his tattoos it’s clear he’s a member of one of the Devil Ride gangs from the wasteland. Naturally, he denies it. He keeps asking about you, though. Seems you made quite an impression on him.”

            “The Commander’s thinking of recruiting him,” Tseng shouted. “There aren’t many boys his age who could outwit our security, steal a Hardy-Daytona, and control it well enough to ride it out of the door. If you hadn’t been there, he’d have got away with it.”

            The ends of the copper pipes were greenly hot, glowing like mako. Reno still said nothing.

            “_You_ were the last one to pull anything remotely similar, if I recall,” Tseng reminded him. “Stealing our own security cameras and fencing them in Wall Market.  You had some nerve.”

            Reno faltered. His finger slipped from the trigger; the torch cut out. “Yeah. Too right I did.” He looked round, pushing up the goggles. “And it took you bastards three months to catch _me.”_

_._

_ Extract from Aviva’s diary, 3rd July 2002 _

_            …. I keep coming back to the same question: why didn’t I say something? I had information Mr Tseng needed. It was my job to speak up. Isn’t that what R’s always telling me? Stop thinking so hard and just do your job. _

_            I can’t blame Rude. He did what he thought was right. I didn’t. I knew I should have stopped them. _

_            I kept my mouth shut because I was afraid somebody might guess my true feelings if I said anything._

_            And even if nobody had guessed, I would still have known the truth. I was jealous. Sick jealous. I’m still jealous. Whoever said jealousy is a poison was right. It seeps into everything, like a pain that won’t let me sleep or think about anything else. My clock says it’s four o’clock in the morning.  Does he sleep, down there in the dark? Does he ever get a break from thinking about her? _

_            I feel like I stood by and did nothing and watched while they drove their car off a cliff. Is that what I wanted? To get rid of her? _

_            I’d give anything to be able to turn back time and undo the damage I’ve done…._

.

One week and four days had passed since Hollander’s escape from Junon, and Tseng was in his office, busy with the inevitable paperwork, when out of the corner of his eye he saw his doorway darken.  He looked up.

            “Can I talk to you?” asked Zack.

            He did not wait for Tseng to reply, but came right in, carefully shutting the door behind him.  With one fluid movement he detached Angeal’s sword from its hook between his shoulder blades and leaned it against the wall, then strode over to Tseng’s desk and dropped his six-foot-three of mako-powered muscle into the nearest swivel chair. Its springs creaked in protest.

            Zack began, “About yesterday….”

            They had run into each other outside Aerith’s church yesterday afternoon.  Such encounters were rare: Tseng usually saw or heard Zack coming from a long way off and took evasive action.  Caught by surprise, but struggling not to show it, he had said something he immediately regretted.  Luckily, that child had interrupted them (the kid, a little Reno in the making, was well known to Tseng, and smart enough to act like he’d never seen a Turk before; the Commander was keeping an eye on him as a potential future recruit). Tseng had taken the opportunity to withdraw, and had waited until he was certain Zack was not coming back before he went into the church.

            “You know, Tseng, you’ve got me all wrong,” said Zack now. “I’m not fooling around with Aerith. She means the world to me. But I just… There’s so much stuff going on that I don’t understand.  I need some answers.  You’ve always been honest with me, and you seem like an OK kind of guy. For a Turk. So I thought the best thing would be if I came and asked you straight.”

            Tseng had been half-expecting something like this ever since their return from Junon.  Putting down his pen, he raised his coffee mug to his lips, took a sip, and said, “Go on.”

            “OK….Let’s start with Cissnei. What’s happened to her? She sent me an email a week ago and I replied but I never heard back from her.  Her phone’s been disconnected.  Is she OK?”

            “Cissnei’s been redeployed.  You won’t be seeing her again.”

            “I asked if she was OK,” Zack repeated, a little more aggressively.

            “The internal workings of this department are not your concern. One of our operatives said some things she should not have said.  She has been disciplined. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

            Zack opened his mouth to press the point, but the stoniness of Tseng’s expression evidently made him think twice. Leaning back heavily in his chair, black brows knotted, he was silent for a few moments, and then said, “SOLDIER’s my business, though. So what about my Executive Director? Can you tell me what’s happened to him?”

            “Director Lazard has left the company.  We don’t know where he’s gone, or what he’s doing.”

            “Cissnei said he was funding Hollander and Genesis.” A note of pained disbelief had come into Zack’s voice. “Is that true?”

            “I’m sorry,” said Tseng, feeling, in that moment, that he really was. “But I can’t talk about it.”

            Zack threw up his hands angrily. “Goddamn company secrets! I’m sick of them! What else can’t you talk about? How about Aerith? Or is she a company secret, too?”

            “She was. For her own protection.”

            “Yeah, right.”

            Tseng leaned forward. “Zack, what did Cissnei say to you about Aerith, exactly?”

            It took Zack a while to describe the things that Cissnei had said. Tseng listened patiently, and gradually it became clear to him that Zack did not fully understand everything his ex-lover had told him.  He lacked the vocabulary – and, perhaps, the imagination.

            “…I understand that she’s the last surviving member of this tribe she comes from; I get that, but I still don’t understand exactly _why_ she’s so interesting to you,” Zack concluded. “She sees like a pretty normal girl to me.  What is it about her that makes her important to Shinra?”

            “Some powerful people within this company believe she may have information that could prove… beneficial. To everyone’s interests.

            “Make Shinra rich, you mean,” Zack countered, cocking a cynical eyebrow. It didn’t look good on him.

            “Shinra is already rich. In any case, I wouldn’t have thought the two were mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, in fact. But that’s beside the point.  Because of this information that Aerith may have, she is at constant risk of falling into, or being seized, by the wrong hands – “

            “And who decides which hands are the wrong hands? You?”

            “I think AVALANCHE would be the wrong hands,” Tseng replied smoothly. “Don’t you? Or have you already forgotten what happened to Essai and Sebastian?”

            Zack’s face darkened. “Of course I haven’t. But are you telling me that _that_’s why you’re always hanging round her? To guard her?”

            “Primarily, yes.  Of course we would like her to share the information with us.  But we can’t force her.  We hope that in time she’ll come to trust us enough to work with us of her own free will.”

            “And you’re not going to tell me what that information is, are you?”

            “No.  It is her secret. If you really want to know, you must ask her.”

            Zack sat in silence, turning Tseng’s words over his mind. “OK,” he said at last. “I guess that seems reasonable.  But if she’s so important, why do you leave her in the slums? Shouldn’t she be living somewhere more - I don’t know – appropriate?”

            “We don’t tell Aerith what to do. She lives where she wants and she does as she pleases.  If she wanted us to move her, she would only need to ask. But she’s happy where she is.”

            “Yeah,” Zack smiled. “That’s true. She loves that Church.  And everybody in the whole neighbourhood loves her.  This is kind of embarrassing, but... D'you know who I thought she was the first time I saw her?  An angel.”

            The boy was blushing.

            “Are we done here?” asked Tseng.

            “Yes – I mean, no –“ Zack stumbled over his words. “There’s something else I have to know.  Cissnei said… I mean, when you watch her, you don’t just _watch_ her, right? You record everything…” Zack’s blush had deepened. He fidgeted in his chair, unable to meet Tseng’s eyes. “Like mission reports. You record everything Aerith does. I mean, what she and I do when we’re together. Cissnei said you have files – “

            “We do not discuss our confidential files,” said Tseng, terminating this awkward line of inquiry.

            Zack continued to look uncomfortable, shifting restlessly in his chair. Without warning he jumped to his feet, moving so fast that for a moment Tseng thought he was going to flee from the room.  But he only crossed over to the window, and stood there, arms folded, apparently staring down at Midgar, though it was obvious to Tseng that he was looking at nothing.  Some unhappy thought had taken hold of his mind, and he was giving it his full attention.

            Zack stood like this for almost a minute, and Tseng watched him, saying nothing.  Then Zack turned away from the window and walked over to where Angeal’s sword rested against the wall.  Tenderly, wistfully, he put out a hand and caressed the smoothness of its hilt. The gesture was one of respect, and grief, and longing.

            _If Angeal were still alive_, Tseng realized, _Zack would not be here now talking to me._

            When Zack looked up, his face was deeply troubled.

            “Tseng – we’re friends, aren’t we?”

            _Are we? _thought Tseng in some surprise.

            In all the many hours of mental energy he had expended on this SOLDIER, _friend_ had never been a word that came to his mind.  _Asset_, yes, and sometimes also _potential liability, question mark_; occasionally, _colleague_, but just as frequently, _tool._ 

            And in the quietest hours of the night, when he was being most deeply honest with himself: _my gift to her._

“There’s something else that’s been bothering me,” Zack continued. “This one isn’t really about Aerith. Or… I don’t know, maybe it is. Have you seen that thing that’s come to live in her church? It sits up in the rafters, like a big bird with four legs.”

            “The monster?”

            Zack frowned. “I wouldn’t call it a monster. More like a – a - guardian?  It saved her from a rogue robot once. I get the strangest feeling that it’s watching over her too. It has…. It’s white, you know. White and gold. Like – like he was.”

            “Angeal?”

            “It has his face.”

            “I know.”

            “What is it?”

            The Turk shrugged. “Probably one of the fragmentary copies that split off during the cloning process. But that’s just my guess. I don’t know much about how it works.”

            “But remember how we thought the Genesis clones were remnants? And now it turns out he’s still alive? And now Seph says Hojo thinks the clones can only stay alive as long as the original donor stays alive – “

            “That’s just Hojo’s theory.  He’s been wrong before.”

            “Angeal could still be alive, Tseng.”

            There was so much hope in his eyes, so much longing in his voice.

            “You killed Angeal,” said Tseng. “You know you did.”

            “But maybe I didn’t. I thought I’d killed Genesis, but he’s not dead either. Maybe they _can’t_ die. That fall down the mineshaft would have killed any normal person.  If Angeal is alive – “

            Tseng held up a hand to stop him. “Zack, believe me when I say that what I’m telling you now is for your own good. Don’t go any further down this road you’re on. Nothing but madness lies at the end of it.  Angeal is dead. He’s happier dead. You gave him what he wanted. Now let him rest in peace.”

            The light of hope went out of Zack’s face. His shoulders slumped. Still he continued to stroke the sword as if it were a living thing.  His eyes were unbearably sad. Tseng had to look away.

            “I guess you’re right,” Zack admitted at last.  He shook himself (throwing off the burden of longing, the weight of a dead hand on his shoulder) and straightened up. His face looked calmer, but no happier.

            Tseng said, “Can I ask you something now?”

            “What?

            “Who else have you spoken to about Aerith? Have you told Sephiroth?”

            Zack snorted. “Are you kidding me? You don’t talk to Seph about stuff like that. I haven’t told anyone. Just my friend Kunsel. But don’t worry – he can keep a secret.”

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

            Rude was working down in the bunker with Reno. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but he went anyway – quietly, but openly. He knew Tseng knew. Which meant the Commander knew. If they wanted to forbid him, they had only to say the word.

            Most of the time he and Reno worked together in silence. _Makes a change_, thought Rude to himself, not really meaning it.  He’d found peace in silence. But Reno would suffocate. That was why Rude was here. There was nothing like saying nothing to get someone talking.

            He did little bits and pieces for Reno. Tidied up – cleaned the ashtrays, threw out the empty bottles. Bought new ones. Took his clothes away, washed them, brought them back.

            “Gee, thanks, Mum.” There was no bite to Reno’s sarcasm. He only said it because he knew Rude expected it.  Which at least meant he was trying, Rude supposed.

            The work itself was good. It felt satisfying to build something where nothing had been before. Rude enjoyed scavenging the corridors and contractors’ dumps for items they could re-use.  There were real treasures to be found: an old pinball machine that Reno soon had working again, and a bicycle bent out of shape.  With a hammer and some pliers, a little oil and a lot of patience, Rude fixed it, got on it, and rode it around the bunker.

            He could have sworn he heard Reno chuckle.

            One day he and Reno were building a partition wall out of old sheetrock and salvaged joists  – Reno was holding the board in place, and Rude was hammering – when Reno said, “D’you ever blame her?”

            Rude’s mouth was full of nails. He spat them into his hand. He knew who Reno meant. “Yeah. At first. Not now.”

            “D’you think you’ll ever see her again?”

            “Who knows?”

            “D’you want to?”

            Rude thought about this one for a long time. Finally he said, “No.”

            All this time Reno had been holding the board in place, as if he’d forgotten about it. Now he put it down. “I don’t blame her,” he said.

            He was talking about a different _her_ now.

            “She just did what she had to do. You know what I’m saying? Whatever it takes, right? She was a Turk on a mission, and I was a means to an end.”

            _Doesn’t make it any better,_ thought Rude_. You guys were partners._

            “She never lied to me. It was me who didn’t listen. I heard what I wanted to hear.”

            _Tell me about it_, thought Rude.  He’d been down that road too.

            “I should have known better. I knew what she was.”

            Rude waited for Reno to elaborate, but Reno was lighting a cigarette and seemed disinclined to go on. Eventually, Rude had to ask. “What was she?”

            “Oh, come on,” Reno laughed, a mirthless sound. Smoke curled out of his nostrils. “What we all are. What the Chief wants. What Shinra needs.”

            “You mean the company’s to blame?”

            Reno did not answer him directly, but instead, after thinking for a moment, posed a question of his own: “Rude, d’you have any idea how many kids there are in that orphanage she came from?”

            “A thousand?”

            “At least.  And how many has the Chief ever recruited?”

            “Just her.”

            “Right. Because she was the one who had what it took. It was the same with all of us. He came looking for us, and he found us, and he licked us into shape, but he didn’t _make _us what we are.”

            Rude, who had given this matter a lot of thought over the last few years, tended to agree. “So - what did?’

            “Who knows? Life? Genes? Bad blood?” Reno snorted. “Fate, if I believed in it.”

             “You’re saying it was inevitable?”

            “I’m just saying I don’t blame her, is all.” Reno picked up the particleboard. “You know, you talk too much, Rude. Has anyone ever told you that? Now quit your yakking and let’s get back to work. This bunker isn’t going to build itself.”

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

            As it turned out, Zack was wrong about his friend. Kunsel couldn’t keep a secret. He told Luxiere; Luxiere told his girlfriend, who worked in Fleet Management, and she told everyone who worked on her floor. Few of them cared one way or the other about a slum girl they had never met, but most of them – the women, anyway – were interested enough in Zack to pass the news on.  Thus, slowly, through the osmosis of idle gossip, knowledge of Aerith’s existence seeped up through the Shinra Building.  With most of the employees the news went in one ear and out the other; the word ‘Cetra’ meant nothing to them, and anyway they had more important things to think about. But a few found it worth remembering.

            Recognising that it was only a matter of time before the rumour reached the 70th Floor, Veld had already made a pre-emptive strike and broken the news to the President himself.  The Old Man was almost delirious with joy. He was all for sending the troops down to bring her into the labs straight away, so that Hojo could scan her brainwaves, unravel her genes, map her memories, find out the coordinates for the Promised Land, and clone half a dozen of her just to be on the safe side.  With difficulty, Veld managed to calm him down and make him understand that Hojo’s labs were incapable of carrying out the kind of procedures he dreamt of: there was no materia for mind-reading.  And the cloning process was far from perfected.  It tended to damage the minds of its subjects rather than duplicate them.  Did Shinra really want to risk the last surviving Cetra in what was, essentially, an experiment?

            “Sometimes I have to wonder just how much my old man understands of the science that goes on in this building,” said Rufus, giving his version of these events to Tseng the next day.  “Of course, he’ll believe anything Hojo tells him. How else could that old fraud keep persuading my father to underwrite his useless so-called experiments?  When I’m running this company, my first act will be to demand his resignation.”

            Only since Lazard’s disappearance had Rufus begun to talk like this, referring openly to the things he planned to do when he became President. Some of his ideas, Tseng had to admit, made sense.

            “I remember Aerith,” Rufus went on. “She used to pull my hair and hit me with a metal ruler.  Imagine you managing to keep her alive and hidden all these years.  I’m impressed.”

            “It was for the good of the company.”

            “Yes. I do see that, actually,” Rufus replied. “But now that her existence is public knowledge, how long will it be before AVALANCHE try to get their hands on her? All the Old Man’s hopes are pinned on that girl, you know. I don’t know what he’d do if you were to lose his Cetra.”

            This concern was also uppermost in Veld’s mind. Left where she was, the primary objective was vulnerable. Yet taking her into protective custody would instantly break the trust Tseng had painstakingly been building between them for the last six years. More could be lost than gained… especially now that her relationship with Zack Fair was bringing her closer to Shinra than she had ever been before. Soon, Veld hoped, she would arrive at the point towards which Tseng had been coaxing her all this time, when she would, at long last, identify her interests with the Company’s, and tell them the secret they had waited so long to know.

            Ifalna’s stubborn silence and needless death were never far from Veld’s thoughts. Aerith’s loyalty to her mother would make any direct cooperation with Shinra feel like a betrayal; he understood that.  But Ifalna’s voice must be fading in the girl’s memory by now.  Zack was alive, warm, flesh and blood, and she loved him. Tseng had been absolutely right to defend the boy: they wouldn’t be where they were now without him.  So close. _So close._ No, they couldn’t risk alienating her at this critical juncture.

            Thus, after giving the matter lengthy consideration, Veld chose to maintain the status quo.

.

_ PHS Transcript 9th August 2002, 7.12 am _

_Hunter: Tseng, sir? It’s me, Hunter._

_Tseng: Are you all right? Where are you?_

_Hunter: Yes I am, no thanks to my so-called colleagues. Skeeter and Tys spiked my soda and left me to sleep it off in a slum bar!_

_&lt;static. Staccato bursts of noise&gt;_

_Tseng: Is that gunfire?_

_Hunter: I’m in a bit of a situation here, sir.  It’s nothing I can’t handle, but the girl insisted I ring you._

_Tseng: What girl?_

_Hunter: The one these thugs are chasing. She ran into me when I was trying to find my way back to the plate, and I’m helping her.  She knew who I was from the suit. She thought you’d sent me, sir. It seems like she knows you. _

_Tseng: Aerith._

_Hunter: I’ll just ask her. &lt;static&gt; Yes, that’s her name._

_&lt;loud gunfire&gt;_

_Tseng: Talk to me! Are you still there? Is she all right?_

_Hunter: We’re in a house. We’re going to go out over the roof. Why are they after her, sir?_

_Tseng: Listen carefully. Try to elude them and make your way to the church. She knows what I mean. I’ll meet you there. Hunter - keep her safe. She’s very precious. _

_._

            When Tseng arrived at the church steps half an hour later, the doors were standing wide open.  He paused on the threshold to listen. Silence. The scent of the flowers was more than usually intense.  Gun in hand, he entered, closing the doors behind him.  The first thing he saw was Hunter, crouching on the floor between the pews, holding her left arm at an unnatural angle.  Before he made a move towards her, he completed his visual survey of his surroundings. Carefully he examined the spaces under each pew, scanned the rafters, and listened for footsteps on the roof. There was nothing to be seen or heard - nothing but the white, winged creature perched on the beam overhead, almost lost in the shadows. It seemed to be asleep.

            “Hunter?” he said quietly.

            “They’ve gone, sir. They heard the helicopter and they left.”

            He lowered his gun and came over to her. “How many?”

            “Chasing us? About half a dozen. Then here, three.” She grimaced as pain shot through her arm. “They were waiting when we arrived. Big guy. Gay nerd with glasses. Tough-looking woman.”

            “Where’s Aerith?”

            Hunter gestured towards the east end of the nave. “She went that way. She’s OK. But boy, she’s furious. I don’t think she wants to talk to you.”

            “You need medical attention,” said Tseng, looking down at her. “Go to the helicopter, have them take you home. I’ll make my own way back.”

            He helped her get to her feet. With her good hand Hunter flicked her ponytail over her shoulder. “I just want you to know,” she said, “That I do not have the slightest idea what has been going on here, and I was in the middle of it. Not a very good position to be in, sir. Can I expect some kind of explanation later?”

            “What you need to know, you’ll be told.  Go now.”

            Once she was gone, he continued to walk up the nave, measuring each footstep, reluctant to break the peace of this place with the echo of his heavy boots.  He called her name, and then, when he got no reply, he called to her again, more loudly. A door opened in the north wall of the sanctuary. His knees weakened with relief when she appeared, her face smudged with dirt and her hair-ribbon coming untied, but safe - safe and whole.

            She advanced on him with rapid steps, her plait whipping from side to side, her lips set in a stern line. There was anger in her voice, and authority, when she pointed at his gun and said, “The day you fire that thing in here is the day you are no longer my friend.”

            To please her, he put the gun away.

            She said, “How’s that girl? She saved my life, I think.”

            “That’s her job. Aerith, tell me, what did they say to you? What did they want?”

            “Oh, stop it!” She beat the air with her fists. “Questions! Work! What do you think they wanted? What do you all want? Why can’t you stop hounding me? I just want to be left alone to get on with my life.

    “I warned you this would happen,” he reminded her. “You were lucky today.”

            “Lucky! Lucky! How can you say that?”

            “You’re still alive – “

            “Yes, and my life is so wonderful, isn’t it?”

            Abruptly she sat down in the nearest pew. Wrapping her arms around her thin shoulders, Aerith stared at the floor and said in a bleak voice, “Zack found out about me.”

            She looked so lost sitting like that, and so alone, hugging herself for comfort. A part of him wondered if maybe she was hoping _he_ would hold her; but the part of him that longed to throw caution to the winds and take her in his arms was reined back by the remembrance that nothing good could come of giving way to such impulses - not for him, not for her, not for anyone. 

            He remained standing. “I’m aware of that,” he replied.

            The coolness of his tone, like a slap in the face, revived her anger. She threw up her head and stared at him accusingly,  “I thought it was a secret. _Our_ secret.“

            “Nobody meant this to happen.”

            “Oh yes they did. That other girl did, the one who told him. The one who works for you.  His other girlfriend.”

            “Aerith, Zack doesn’t have any other girlfriends.”

            She laughed in a way he had never heard her laugh before: sourly. “You’re always trying to protect me, aren’t you? But I’m not a kid any more. I have eyes; I can see. He’s looking at other girls all the time, even when he’s out with me.  And they look back. If he’s looking at them when we’re together, what’s he doing with them when we’re apart? Especially now – now that he knows I’m…. not like other people – “

            “Aerith – “

            “I wouldn’t blame him if he decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. He has enough on his plate as it is. He doesn’t need this.”

            Tseng’s gut instinct was to rage at Zack. Why couldn’t the SOLDIER at least have the decency to curb his roving eye when he out was with Aerith? Couldn’t he see how vulnerable she was beneath that streetwise veneer?  If he loved her, why did he have to make her unhappy? -

            What a stupid question.

            Tseng sat down in the pew beside hers. “What do you want me to say?” he asked, folding his arms.  “It’s a difficult situation. You’re very young.  Both of you.”

            “Oh please. You sound like my mother.”

            “Elmyra doesn’t approve?”

            “That’s the understatement of the year. She thinks he’s no good for me. According to her, all soldiers just want one thing, and any girl who runs around with them gets a reputation.”

            “Don’t you think she’d think that about any man her daughter dated? You’re very dear to her, Aerith.”

            Aerith sighed, and pulled at the white drop earring Tseng remembered had once hung in Ifalna Gast’s ear. “The thing is,” she confessed, “I hate to admit it, but sometimes I can’t help wondering if maybe my mother is right.  When he’s here with me he’s so – so – _overwhelming_, I can’t think of anything except how much I want to be with him. It’s when I’m alone that the doubt starts to eat away at me.  I want to trust him, but I’m afraid to.  I know I’m young. But I don’t want to be played for a fool.”

            She looked expectantly into Tseng’s eyes.

            The pain he felt when she did this was of a peculiarly exquisite kind. She trusted him to give her the truth. But she wanted more than that. She wanted hope, too. She wanted him to tell her she could trust Zack – and she would believe him, though she had been unable to believe Zack when he told her the same thing.

            Well, the truth he could give her. As for the hope… that was something she would have to make up her own mind about.

            “Aerith, I can’t predict what will happen in the future. I can’t promise you it will all work out. All I can tell you is what I see happening now. Yes, it’s true that Zack used to have a lot of girlfriends, but I don’t think any of them were very serious. Since he met you, that’s all stopped. As far as I know, you are the only one.”

            “Truly?”

            “Yes.”

            She smiled. “So… do you watch him too, then?”

            “On occasion.”

            Her smile deepened. A glint of mischief brightened her eyes. “That’s really not good for me to know. I might be tempted to ask too many questions. Are you _really_ sure he hasn’t got anyone else?” she demanded, suddenly earnest again.

            “Yes.”

            “But if he’s happy with me, why is he always looking at other girls?”

            “Men do look. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

            “Do _you_ look?”

            “When I’m not working.”

             “But you’re always working,” Aerith laughed; her heart sounded lighter now. “Poor Tseng, what a life! Looks like I’ll just have to fix you up with a girlfriend myself.  Let me see – you need a girl who likes to live a little… Someone petite, and not too serious – oh, and she should be a good cook, too, to stop you looking so peaky.  Yes, you just leave it all to me….”

            He allowed her to rattle on in this vein, amusing herself, until her imagination was exhausted and she fell silent, her eyes sparkling.

            He said, “I need to know about the three people who were here.”

            “Oh, you’re no fun.  All right, let’s see – “ She began ticking the points off on her fingers. “One was a thin man with glasses and a gun, and one was a tall, strong man wearing a bandana. I don’t know what their names were.  Then there was a tall woman with short brown hair. They said her name was Elfe. She’s sick.”

            “Sick?”

            “In pain. I could see that. And she has a secret, but she doesn’t know that she does. A secret secret. Maybe it’s the secret that’s making her sick.”

            “How can you know that?”

            Aerith grinned. “The flowers told me. But seriously, she is ill. I was worried for her. They told me the cure for her illness could only be found in the Promised Land, and that was why they wanted to find it.”

            “You’re not really that gullible, are you?”

            “They didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s funny how everyone believes in this place. I wonder if it even exists. If it does, why hasn’t someone found it? You’ve been all over this planet – why haven’t _you_ seen it?”

            “This planet has barely begun to be explored. It would take us lifetimes… “

            She put a hand on his knee and looked into his face. “I don’t know where it is, Tseng. Why won’t you believe me?”

            A thought darted across his mind: _because if I believed you, I’d no longer have an excuse to come here…_

            Down at the far end of the nave the church doors boomed open and Zack came bounding in, his footsteps making the floorboards shake. “Aerith! Are you all right?” He ran up to her and pulled her into a protective embrace. “Tseng, what happened? Is she all right?”

            “I fought them off with my bare hands! Biff, pow - ” Aerith giggled, landing a playful punch on Zack’s chin.

            “Was it AVALANCHE?” he asked Tseng.

            “She had a lucky escape, but she’s fine. Now that you’re here, I’ll leave her with you,“ he added as he got up to go.

            “Hang on,” said Zack. “I’ll walk with you. Aerith, wait here. I’ll be back in a minute, OK?”

            Tseng had no desire to talk to Zack right now. All he wanted was to get away. But Zack was determined. He followed Tseng out the door and onto the porch, and when Tseng would have walked down the steps he put a hand on the Turk’s shoulder to hold him back.  Tseng wrenched away from Zack’s grip, and turned around to face him. 

            The SOLDIER had taken up an aggressive stance, feet wide apart, arms folded.  Never before had Tseng been made to feel so conscious of Zack’s sheer size, his height and the strength of his presence.

            Zack said, “I don’t think she’s safe here any longer. We should move her for her own protection.”

            When he heard this, something inside Tseng – his patience; his willingness to efface himself from the picture – snapped.

            “I’ve known Aerith all her life,” he said, “And you’ve known her for what, a year? Don’t try to tell me how to look after her.”

            “All her life?” Zack was startled. “Nobody told me that.“

            “This is nothing to do with you. It’s between Aerith and me. She knows she has only to say the word.”

            “What word? What are you talking about? What the hell is going on here, Tseng? What do you mean, you’ve known her all her life?”

            “I’ve told you before. Ask _her_.”

            Zack’s brow furrowed.  He stood deep in thought for a few moments.

            _How he’s changed_, thought Tseng.

            The clueless boy who, nearly three years ago, had partnered the Turks’ second-in-command on that mission to Banora would never have dared to assert himself like this.  Nor would he have asked the kind of questions Zack had begun to ask these last few months.  Or doubted his superiors. Or criticized Shinra.

            No one could call him a puppy now.

            “I’m not happy with this situation,” said Zack.

            “Do you think I am?”

            Zack shrugged as if that didn’t matter. “It’s not just that she’s in danger,” he said. “I really hate knowing we’re being watched all the time. What happened today proved that you can’t guarantee her safety. So why don’t you call off your goons?”

             Tseng opened his mouth, but Zack waved a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “Listen, Tseng – we both want Aerith to be safe, don’t we?  So let’s come to some arrangement. When I’m with Aerith, I’ll be responsible for her protection, and your watchdogs can clear off and let us have some privacy. When I have to leave her, I’ll give you a call, and your people can take over. What d’you say?”

            “I can’t make that kind of decision – “

            “Put it to Commander Veld then. C’mon, man, help me out here. I know you have to do your job, but you’re the one guy who really understands what Aerith means to me.  We have so little time together. When we are together, I’d like for us to be _alone_. Couldn’t you let us have at least a chance?”

            Tseng avoided giving Zack a straight answer, and left soon after, but the question continued to worry away at his mind.  Let them have a chance? A chance for what, though?  Did Zack actually think that he and Aerith had some kind of future together? 

            Were they falling into the danger, as Aerith’s parents had done before them, of being seduced by the illusion of freedom?

            Tseng was beginning to wonder if perhaps he had made a mistake in allowing Aerith’s relationship with the SOLDIER to progress as far as it had. Where would it end? For end it must, sooner or later, and all the ends he could foresee were bad ones. Yet how could he stop it now?

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

_ 19 th September 2002  15.45 pm _

            Reno was back in the office for the first time in almost three months.  He’d been inside the plate for so long he looked like something that had just crawled out from under a rock. His colleagues were being very careful around him, carefully pretending that he had never been away. To his face they acted so normal it was almost painful to see. But when they thought he wasn’t looking….

            Aviva’s huge round black eyes, pitying him –

            Rosalind, her glow extinguished, glancing his way with a look on her face that said, _I know –_

            Knox, sighing from time to time over his paperwork –

            Skeeter, eyeing him curiously and waiting for - what?

            It made him want to take out his gun and fire it into the air. _Fucking stop tiptoeing round me! _

            Had they all sat down before he came back and had a discussion about how they should handle him? _Don’t talk about stuff he wasn’t here for! Don’t ask any questions! And never mention her name!_

            Reno couldn’t stand it another instant.

            He stood up. “It’s dead in here since Cissnei left,” he said, pushing the components he was working on into a box. “You stiffs can keep your morgue. I’m going to go work somewhere else.”

            He went into the briefing room and spread his work out on the table.

            Progress on the bunker had advanced to the stage where the computer network could be installed. The work was time consuming; Mozo and Rude had been assigned to help him.  They could not simply walk down into the plate carrying boxes of monitors and CPUs; that would be too conspicuous. Each item had to be taken apart and labeled, carried down hidden under their clothes or in shopping bags, and then painstakingly reassembled.  The task demanded concentration and a high level of attention to detail: it was the kind of work Reno could lose himself in, as long as he was left alone.

            The door opened. Mozo and Rude came in, carrying boxes of their own.

            “Fuck off,” said Reno.

            “I’d like nothing better,” Mozo replied, setting his box down on the table, “But right now I’ve got wiring to do, and you took the needle-nose pliers.”

            They spread themselves out around the table and went to work.  For some time, maybe half an hour, there was no conversation beyond ‘pass me that screwdriver’ and ‘where’s the tape?’.  Reno smoked while he worked. With both his hands engaged, he never took the cigarette from his mouth, but occasionally rolled it from one side to the other, skillfully flicking it with his tongue so that the ash dropped on the floor and not in his workspace.  Mozo went and got everyone coffee.  When he came back, he asked, “What’s the plan with these things? How are they going to work?”

            Reno explained, “The Chief wants me to connect them up to the surveillance bank here with a radio link. But I don’t like it. Radio’s too easy to jam. I’d rather run a cable. Hide it among all the others.”

            “Be kilometers of cable,” said Rude.

            “I could do it. Wouldn’t be hard. Just take time.”

            They went back to working silently. 

            While his hands were busy, Reno’s thoughts ranged over many things, some of them more pleasant than others. Eventually they came to rest on the memory of helping Cid Highwind on the Shinra 26  - maybe because what he’d been doing there that day was like the work he was doing now, fiddling with a finicky mess of wires, turning them into something that made sense and had a purpose. For almost two whole days, there in Rocket Town, he hadn’t been a Turk; he’d just been a regular guy doing a regular job. A different person. And it had felt…  OK. Though maybe it wasn’t something he’d want to do for the rest of his life.

            “Hey guys,” he said,  “D’you ever….” No, stupid idea. He tailed off.

            “What?” asked Rude.

            “Nothing. Forget it.”

            “Go on, we’re curious now,” said Mozo.

            “Well… All right. But you asked. I was just thinking, do you ever wonder about that other life? I mean, the one you’d have had if the Chief hadn’t come for you?”

            “Sure,” said Rude. “Sometimes.”

            “What would it have been, d’you think? What would you have done?”

            Rude shrugged. “Brickie’s mate? Junk dealer? I’d enjoy that.”

            “Cabaret artist, you,” Mozo laughed. “But you forget, Reno, I _had_ another life before I came here.”

            “Nah, I remember. You were a private eye inn Costa.”

            “So what went wrong?” asked Rude.

            Mozo turned to him. “I broke the first rule of sleuthing.”

            “Which is?”

            “Never get involved.” Mozo paused dramatically.

            Rude and Reno waited.

            “If you’re going to tell, tell,” said Reno.

            “OK,” Mozo nodded. “So – here’s the gig. There’s this guy who owns half the Costan coast and he has this son that’s his only child. So this rich guy fixes it for his son to marry the daughter of his biggest business rival. The companies are going to merge, everybody gets richer, everybody’s happy. But there’s a hitch. Junior doesn’t want to marry business rival’s little heiress. He’s already in love with some other chick.  So he runs away with said chick. Rich guy hires me to track them down. I’m supposed to eliminate the problem.”

            “Couldn’t you find them?” asked Rude

    “Oh, please, don’t insult me. I found them, no problem. Cutest pair of love bugs you ever saw. And scared shitless at the sight of your truly.” A shadow passed over his face; his smile faltered. “Good kids. Nice kids.” Then he rubbed a hand briskly over his scrubbing-brush hair, grinned, and took up the story again. “I guess I let them get away. What a sap, huh? Thing is, if I’d kept my mouth shut and let the rich guy think the kids had given me the slip, I’d probably have got off with nothing worse than a few bruises and some dents in my reputation. But no. Like a fool, I decide that I can fix it for everybody. So back I go to rich guy and say, ‘hey, why can’t you be a proper Dad and respect your son’s wishes? Don’t you want him to be a man? A man has a right to choose his own wife.’   So now guess whose blood this guy’s after?  That was when I called the Chief and told him I wanted to accept his offer.”




            “He’d been trying to recruit you for a while, huh?” said Reno.

            “Only the best for Shinra. You ask anyone in Costa. They’ll remember me. But what about you, Reno? You asked the question.  D’you ever wonder what you might have done if things had turned out differently?”

            “Yeah. I was thinking maybe I could have been an electrician – “

            Rude burst out laughing.

            “What’s so funny?” Reno demanded.

            “You,” Rude chortled. “Denim overalls. Cloth cap. Little toolbox.  I can just picture it.”

            Rude’s laughter was contagious.  Mozo started chucking too, and said, “Yes, yes – look, this is Reno, knocking on the door.” Putting on a nasal voice, he drawled, “‘Morning, ma’am, Sparky here, just come to fiddle with your fuse box, yo –‘ “

             “Fuck you, I don’t sound like that!” Reno paused. “Do I?” The note of anxiety in his voice set the other two laughing harder.  After a few moments, Reno joined in.

            When their laughter had died down, he asked Mozo, “So anyway, how old were you? When you signed up?

            “Twenty-four. Young and idealistic.”

            “D’you ever regret it?”

            “Nope. I like being alive. I mean, everyone gets the bloom rubbed off them sooner or later, but this is a pretty good life. We do work that needs doing. The pay’s not bad. My colleagues are all lunatics, but you can’t have everything.  And you know me: I always like to see the bad guys get what’s coming to them – “

            The ringing of his phone interrupted Mozo in mid-flow. It was Tseng. They spoke briefly. Then Mozo shut his phone, stood up, and said to Rude and Reno, “Gotta go. The Boss has an assignment for me.”  Shaping his hand into a gun, he squinted down the barrel fingers, pretending to shoot each of them in turn. “Pyow! Pyow! Catch you later, eh, Rude? See you, Sparky!”

. 

_ 20th September, 2002, 10.00 am _

            Shinra Helicopter B1-9 hovered in the sky above the Nibelheim reactor. Tseng was at the controls, with Cavour in the co-pilot’s seat beside him. Back in the hold Mink and Mozo were putting on their parachutes. Tseng looked down through the wispy clouds at the domed roof of the reactor, straining his eyes for some sign of life.

            All contact had been lost with the reactor personnel twenty-four hours earlier, halfway through a phone conversation made by the terrified manager to Director Reeve Tuesti. In the transcript of their conversation, which Tseng had read, the manager had said they were under attack, and kept repeating the words _it’s the monster. Those monsters. _  

            But monsters did not try to take over reactors. Monsters did not plan, or have a purpose, or organise. They were animals: they slept, ate, and responded to stimuli. Some human intelligence was behind this. Tseng suspected Genesis, and possibly Lazard, though it could just as easily be AVALANCHE.

            To make matters worse, he’d been unable to get in contact with the Commander. Veld had disappeared a week ago on an unspecified mission with Charlie and had been incommunicado ever since. “I can’t hold your hand forever,” he’d said to Tseng before he left. “I miss the field work, goddammit. You’ll be fine. I have faith in you.”

            From the back of the helicopter Mink said, “We’re ready, sir.”

            “Proceed with extreme caution,” Tseng advised them. “You don’t know what you’ll be facing down there.  The priority is to establish the facts of the situation, and to save lives if you can, but don’t put yourselves at risk.”

            “Roger,” Mink and Mozo replied.  They each removed their headsets. Mozo went first, throwing himself through the open door and hurtling earthwards. Mink followed more sedately, stepping out into the air.

            Tseng gave them a few moments before he yawed the helicopter around. Far below, their two parachutes bobbed like thistledown on the wind.  “I hope they’ll be all right,” he murmured to himself.  Then he brought up the collective, and began the long flight back to Midgar.

.

_ 15.40 pm _

The coastline of the Great Continent was just appearing over the horizon when his phone rang.

_Mink: Sir, it’s impossible to get anywhere near the reactor. The entire mountaintop is overrun with dragons._

_Tseng: Any sign of survivors? _

_Mink: None, sir. But the reactor itself is still generating some power._

_Tseng: Any evidence as to who’s behind this?_

_Mink: None, sir, I’m sorry._

_Tseng: Damn. What’s your current position?_

_Mink: We’re on the path just below the reactor._

_Tseng: It’s too easy to get lost in those mountains. Can you see the ropeway from there?_

_Mink: I know where it is, sir. I’ve been here before._

_Tseng: See if you can get to it. Go down to the town and await my instructions. _

_._

_ 17.15 hours _

He was climbing out of the helicopter on the edge of the Sector Six slums when the phone rang again.

_Mozo: We’re in the town now, Boss. The cable car was attacked. It’s been destroyed. We walked down. A girl showed us the way._

_Tseng: What girl?_

_Mozo: One of the locals. We found her up near the reactor. She was looking for her lost cat. She seems to know these mountains pretty well. _

_Tseng: Good. We’re going to need a guide. Hire her. The President’s called out SOLDIER. He’s sending Sephiroth and Zack Fair._

_Mozo: Both of them?  Is that really necessary?_

_Tseng: It’s the President’s decision. That’s reactor’s our flagship. They’ll be there tomorrow afternoon with a couple of regular army troopers. Wait for them at the inn, and brief them. _

_Mozo: Roger. _

_._

            Zack had asked him to come to the playground.  Tseng made his way there on foot. While still some distance away, he saw that Zack was not alone, and felt angry with himself for having failed to foresee this.  He was in no mood for Aerith’s playfulness this evening.

            The wagon Zack had made for her was loaded with flowers. Were they trying to sell them?  Who in these slums had gil to spare for something they could neither eat nor wear nor use?  And why set up shop in the playground? Was this some kind of game they were playing? They’d have done better to push it to Wall Market, though if Aerith really meant to make a go of this venture she’d need to come to Upper Midgar; that was where the money was. She would have to get over her fear of the sky… but then, if Zack had talked her into selling her flowers, he could probably talk her into anything.

            Tseng concealed himself behind the big slide and waited for Zack to realize he was there. It wasn’t long before one of the local children came in, a friend of Aerith’s. While she was showing him her wagon and explaining about her new business, Zack came over to Tseng.

            “Look after her while I’m gone,” he said. “You’re the only one I can rely on.”

            Tseng gave his throaty chuckle.

            “What’s so funny?” asked Zack.

            _Do your job_, thought Tseng, _and I’ll do mine. _

.__

22nd September 2002, 08.32 hours

_Mink: Sir, the General is refusing to let us accompany them to the reactor._

_Tseng: Did he give a reason?_

_Mink: No, sir. Zack said we cramp their style, though. _

_Tseng: All right. Don’t push it. They can brief you when they come back._

_Mink: Roger._

Tseng closed the phone.

Clearly, Sephiroth suspected Genesis, too.

.

22nd September 2002, 19.45 hours

_Mozo: SOLDIER’s back, Boss. But Sephiroth’s acting very strangely. They won’t tell us anything. _

_Tseng: Have you talked to the troopers who went with them?_

_Mozo: One got left behind when a rope bridge broke and had to make his own way back. He doesn’t know anything. Sephiroth wouldn’t let the other one go in the reactor._

_Tseng: There’s something not right about this._

_Mozo: I agree._

_Tseng: Now that they’ve cleared the path, I want you to go up to that reactor yourselves tomorrow and check it out._

_Mozo: Understood. _

_._

22nd September 2002, 20.00 hours

_Tseng: Zack, what’s going on?_

_Zack: There was nothing in the reactor. Nothing._

_Tseng: No sign of Genesis?_

_Zack: No!_

_Tseng: Is there something wrong with Sephiroth?_

_Zack: No. He’s fine. Look, Tseng, I’m the only friend he’s got left. Just leave him to me, OK?_

_Tseng: Be careful, Zack. Don’t forget who you work for._

There was a click, and the line went dead.

.

23rd September 2002, 13.50 hours

_Mink: We’re up here at the reactor, sir, but we can’t get in. It’s been locked. We can’t pick it. _

_Tseng: Who locked it?_

_Mink: I guess SOLDIER did, sir. Do you want us to blow it open?_

_Tseng: No. We don’t want to risk letting loose whatever is in there. But one of you needs to keep an eye on the reactor at all times. What are Zack and Sephiroth doing? _

_Mink: The General went into the old mansion this morning. Said he wanted to do some research. Zack’s in there too. _

_Tseng: What are they up to? Mink, tell Mozo I want him to watch the reactor. You keep an eye on the General. Report to me if he does anything unusual._

_Mink: Roger_

_ T_seng made himself sound more confident than he felt. He wished Commander Veld would return, if for no other reason than to reassure him that he was making the right decisions. He’d never had to deal directly with Sephiroth before. How did one handle a thing – a man – like Sephiroth?  What was going on in that cold mind of his, that heart without desires?   Did he miss his old comrades, his peers? Was he planning, perhaps, to join Genesis and Hollander, as Lazard had done? The possibility was there… So shouldn’t he, Tseng, be doing something to prevent it? But what? All the Turks put together were not capable of taking on Sephiroth.  Zack might be… But Zack too was beginning to show signs of chafing under the yoke of his bondage to Shinra. His loyalty could not be taken for granted, either.

            To move against them in any way might be to provoke the very turn of events Tseng feared.  For now, then, Mink and Mozo would continue with their watching brief. And if it became necessary to take action…

            Tseng would cross that bridge when he came to it.

.

 _1st October 2002  10.56 am_

            The office was almost empty. Reno and Rude were still at work dismantling the last of the computers for the bunker. Hunter was over in the weapons room, cleaning guns. The cat was asleep under Rude’s desk.  On the wall, the minute hand of the clock ticked slowly towards eleven am.

            “I’m bored,” said Reno.

            The door hissed open and Tseng came running in. He looked closer to panic than they had ever seen him. “Who else is here?” he demanded.

            “Just the Honey,” said Reno, jumping to his feet. “What’s happened?”

            “I have no time to explain. Arm yourselves, get Hunter, and meet me at the helipad as fast as you can. Cavour will come with us too – “ These last words were thrown over his shoulder; he was already halfway out the door.

            Reno called after him, “Where are we going?”

            “I’ll brief you in the chopper. Hurry!”

            Reno turned to Rude. “What lit his fuse?”

            Rude shook his head. His eyes said _something bad’s happened. Can’t you feel it?_

“Yeah,” Reno nodded, tightening his grip on his mag-rod. “Well, come on then, partner, don’t just stand there. Let’s move.”

 


	9. Nibelheim

            They were passing over Corel when the smoke became visible. At first no more than a black wisp, curdling in the sky to the west like a drop of poison in a glass of clear water, it grew with frightening rapidity; by the time they had crossed the mountains roiling grey billows of ash filled half the sky. Swarms of glowing cinders swept past their windows, rattling against the glass.  Reno was forced to swing upwind, bringing the helicopter in low and wide to keep the engines clear.  Hot updrafts buffeted them from side to side. The Turks gripped their seats with both hands to avoid being thrown against each other. Hunter looked as if she was going to be sick: the colour had drained from her face, and she was shaking. When a gust of wind parted the dense smoke to give the Turks their first glimpse of a wall of flame, she whimpered like an animal and tucked her head between her knees.

            They came to earth with a teeth-rattling jolt.  Everyone unbuckled their seat-belts. Tseng threw open the cargo bay door, and at once the noise and the heat hit them like a blast furnace; Hunter was thrown back, or threw herself backwards, into the furthest corner of the hold and immediately curled up into the foetal position, face to the wall. Tseng called her name two, three times, ordering her to pull herself together. He got no response. Reno heard him curse under his breath, “Why’d I bring her?  I’m not thinking straight….”

            Turning back to the others, Tseng took a bottle of water from the cooler, soaked his pocket handkerchief and tied it over his face.  Those who had handkerchiefs of their own did likewise; those who did not, improvised. Reno tore a strip from his shirt. Tseng passed round more water, and gestured for them to pour it over their heads and their clothes.

            “Search for survivors!” he shouted.

            The thickness of the smoke made it impossible for the Turks to see more than a few metres in front of their faces. They quickly became separated as they blundered up the hillside and into the burning town.  Reno found himself in front of a door and pushed it open. As soon as he set foot inside he recognized it as the item shop where Cissnei had bought a silver bangle. Behind the counter the grandmother who had sold Cissnei her bangle sat slumped in her rocking chair, eyes closed as if she was sleeping. The back half of her head had been removed in a single clean cut.

            Showers of sparks and liquid flame fell around him. He looked up, and saw that the ceiling was about to give way. Running outside, he stumbled over the body of the innkeeper lying face down in a tangle of his own entrails.  He veered away, across the square, and ran into a house whose door had been ripped from its hinges. “Hello? Hello?” he called out.  There was no answer but the voice of the fire, hissing, crackling. Tongues of flame were darting down the stairs.  Bent almost double, he ran into the kitchen and saw a family huddled together beside the stove.  The father had bent his head close to the two children. The mother was staring at Reno. He pulled the wet strip of shirt from his mouth and shouted, “Hey!”

            They did not move.

            He could see no wounds, no blood. Sephiroth appeared not to have touched them. They must have suffocated when the firestorm sucked the oxygen from the room.

            Reno himself was finding it hard to breathe. He ran back outside and looked around, straining to catch sight of the others.  The smoke was blurring his vision. He rubbed his stinging eyes. When he looked again, he saw a doll with rigid limbs, naked and headless, lying near his foot. Some child’s toy –

            No. It was a baby.

            _Stop looking at it!_

Tearing his eyes from the broken thing, he ran, shouting for Rude, for Tseng, for anyone.

            When Tseng had told him on the helipad that they were going to Nibelheim, Reno had nearly refused.  Now, he wished he had.

            Despite the cloth tied across his nose and mouth, he could feel the lining of his lungs blistering. Under his feet the ground was so hot that the crepe soles of his boots had softened and become sticky.  Worst of all, though, was the smell, the oily, sooty, sweetish reek of charcoal and burnt flesh that made him gag on every breath he took.

            From across the square he heard Rude’s voice calling, “Help me!”

            Reno ran to him. “There’s a kid under there,” said Rude, pointing at a heap of smoking rubble. “He spoke to me. Help me lift this -”

            Together they heaved a couple of fallen beams aside. Rude dropped to his knees and brushed the ash from the boy’s nose and mouth.  The right side of his face had been badly burnt, but Reno recognised him: it was Cissnei’s weird kid, the one who saw ghosts everywhere.

             “I got you,” Rude rasped. He slipped one arm under the boy’s shoulders, the other under his knees, and tried to straighten up.  The boy’s chest convulsed in a spasm. His head dropped sideways; his eyes rolled back; his limbs tensed and then grew slack.

            “No,” said Rude. “No – Reno, help me – “

            Stooping, he laid the child back on the ground, knelt beside him, took a deep breath and blew into the boy’s mouth. The limp body heaved. “Do his heart,” he said to Reno.

            “He’s gone, Rude.”

            “No – “

            For several minutes, while Reno watched, Rude fought to breathe life back into the dead child.  Then he sank back on his heels, coughing. He spat black phlegm onto the ground, took off his sunglasses, wiped his watering eyes. “OK,” he said to himself, “Keep going.”  Standing up, he plunged into the thickening smoke and was lost to sight before Reno could follow.

            Reno turned round. Not far away he saw Tseng standing alone, staring into the smouldering ruin of the collapsed water tower.  A pair of giant metal barrel-hoops, all that remained of the tank, were clearly visible, glowing white hot among the orange coals. Tseng appeared to be mesmerized by the sight.  His hair had come loose from its ponytail and was blowing about in the hot wind. His arms hung like dead weight at his sides. Falling sparks had eaten holes in the shoulders and sleeves of his dark jacket; through these little holes the pristine white of his shirt could be seen.

            Reno went over to him. “Boss, it’s hopeless.”

            Tseng did not respond. Reno had to repeat himself, leaning forward to shout in Tseng’s ear. 

            “Yes,” said Tseng. His voice was flat, his eyes elsewhere.

            “Well, what should we do?”

             “I don’t know what to do.”

            _He’s zoning out_, thought Reno. Panic rose in him. Grabbing Tseng by the arms, he shook him and yelled, “Don’t do this to us, Boss! Not now! C’mon! Snap out of it!”

            A familiar voice rang out in the distance, “Tseng! Reno!”

            At the sound of his name Tseng’s stiff body came to life in Reno’s hands. Reno sagged with relief. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Commander Veld solidify out of the smoke and come striding towards them, closely followed by about thirty of Heidegger’s troopers, several dozen technicians in lab coats, and Professor Hojo.

            “Oh god,” Tseng muttered, “_Him_?”

            Veld walked straight up to them. Tseng and Reno stood at attention. Their Commander wasted no words. “Where’s Sephiroth?”

            “At the reactor, sir – “

            “Why aren’t you there?”

            _Should we be? _Reno wondered. _Why?_

“But…everyone’s dead there, sir,” said Tseng. “And Zack’s up there… Zack Fair went after him. He can deal with the General.  Mozo’s up there too. I thought we could do more good here – “

            “Why are we wasting time?” Hojo cut in. “Veld, I need one of your people to escort my technician into the mansion and confirm that the equipment in the lab is functioning. You – red-head – “

            Reno’s entire body tensed with the violence of his internal _No. _Then he felt Tseng’s steadying hand on his arm, and realized that the Boss had managed to pull himself out of his funk, thank god, and was stepping in.

            “Let Cavour go,” Tseng said, calling the younger Turk over.  Veld briefly described to him where to find the master switch for the backup generators and how to get down to the basement lab; Hojo gave him a key. Cavour and the technician ran off, and Hojo turned back to the others, chuckling.

             “Who would have thought I’d ever work in my first lab again? Just like old times, eh, Veld?  Well, let’s get a move on, we haven’t got all day.  You can bring the boy with you if you like.”

            It took Reno a couple of moments to realize that, by ‘the boy’, Hojo meant Tseng.

            “Where are we going?” Tseng asked Veld.

            “Up to the reactor.  The Professor has a valuable sample stored there and he wants to retrieve it.  The troopers are here to ensure its safety during transportation.”

            “All of them? What about the rescue? We -“

            “The people of this town are not our priority,” said Veld, cutting him short. “Company property is.”

            He glanced across at Reno – and Reno saw, in his face, that same look he remembered so well from the day they first went up together in the helicopter seven years ago, the suggestion that more was going on with this iceberg of a man than met the eye.

            Hojo now spoke again. “This one,” he pointed at Reno, “And that one – “ he swung round to indicate Rude, who was walking towards them, “Can carry on searching for survivors. If they find any they must take them to the mansion.”

            “Mink’s up there with a few already,” said Tseng.

            “Just a moment,” said Veld, as if he were thinking of something entirely different. “Reno, a word with you. And you, Rude.” He cupped one hand under Reno’s elbow, put the other hand on Rude’s shoulder, and drew them a little aside. In an undertone meant for their ears only, he said, “It would be better if there were no survivors. You understand me?”

            Reno and Rude looked into their Chief’s eyes, and nodded.

            “Tell the others,” said Veld.

            “Chop chop,” Hojo called out. “We’re wasting time here. Let’s go.”

.

            _It would have been better for me if there were no survivors_, thought Reno to himself an hour later.

            He was climbing over a mess of broken bricks and charred timbers that had once been a house, looking for somewhere to sit.  He needed a cigarette badly. His legs were shaking like a rookie’s and he was furious with himself for being so weak, but there seemed to be no help for it.

            Always before, when he’d killed someone, he’d been able to look them in the eye while he did it.

            Some had gone down fighting. Some had begged to live. Some of them had pissed themselves. None of them had died willingly. Not like the one he’d killed just now.

            A white gleam caught his eye, and he turned his head to see a toilet, of all random things, standing shiny and solid in the midst of the wreckage, not a crack or chip anywhere on it.  _It’s weird how that happens_, he thought.  It seemed like in every disaster there was always some unlikely object, like a crystal vase, or a newborn kitten, that somehow survived unscathed.

            Turning away from the toilet, he continued to pick his way across the hot, shifting rubble until his feet touched earth. Ahead of him was a low stone wall, relatively undamaged.  Here he sat down, and took out his packet of cigarettes.  The sweet smell of the tobacco alone was enough to begin calming his nerves. He drew one, put it between his lips, and fumbled in his pocket for his mako lighter.

            Why should it have been so hard to kill for mercy’s sake, when killing to order had always come so easily?  He had had to force himself to look at that raw, burnt face, its eyes and teeth a terrible white against the blackened skin, and he had taken great care to make sure the shot was clean, though his stomach was rising in his throat and his hands were shaking and he wanted nothing more than to run away.  And afterwards it had felt wrong to him to leave the body like that, open to the elements for the flies and the monsters to feed on, so he had done his best to cover it up, piling the chunks of concrete with his gloved hands until he had built a sort of little funeral mound out of the ruins of what had once been someone’s house.

            And when he was done he had pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his pocket and turned and walked away until he had come to this wall, where he was sitting now, trying to light his cigarette, but his damn clumsy fingers just would not do what they were told; he kept flicking the lighter and getting nothing, and suddenly it all seemed so fucking _ridiculous_ to him that here he was, unable to raise one tiny spark while all around him an entire town was in flames, that he burst out laughing.

            He wished Rude were with him to share the joke.

            He wished this laughing didn’t have to hurt so much. All that smoke he’d inhaled. Felt like his ribs were splitting.

            He sure as hell hoped there’d be no more survivors.

.

But there were survivors. Mink had managed to save about a dozen, right at the beginning of Sephiroth’s rampage, and had taken them to safety up at the mansion. As night began to close in Reno made his way there and found them scattered on the front lawn: Mink was kneeling over an badly-burned teenager who might once have been pretty; Rude was helping a old man take a drink from a bottle of water, and Cavour was re-bandaging a deep sword cut on a woman’s arm.

            Mink jumped to her feet when she saw Reno approach, and ran over to him. “Give me your Cure materia,” she demanded. “We’re all out.”  She was as tall as he was, and equally broad-shouldered.

            Reno shot a hard look at the back of Rude’s head, but Rude didn’t turn round. “The Chief said there should be no survivors,” he told her, keeping his voice low.

            Mink’s jaw tightened. “Just hand over the materia, Reno. They need it.” Her eyes dared him to challenge her.

            The last thing Reno felt like doing right now was getting into fight with one of his colleagues.  Or maybe that was the second last thing… because the _very_ last thing he want to do right now was to take out his gun and shoot that old man, or that injured woman, or that dying girl, in front of everyone’s eyes.  No, he couldn’t do it.  Let the Chief sort this one out. Reno had had enough for one day.

            Popping the materia from its slot, he gave it to Mink. “That’s all I’ve got.”

            “Let’s hope it works,” she said, running back to the unconscious girl, whose breath had begun to rattle in the back of her throat.

            Reno walked over to Cavour and crouched beside him. “What does she mean? Materia always works.”

            Cavour shook his head. “That’s what I thought, too. But I’m starting to wonder. It’s like they don’t _want_ it to work. Like they’d rather – “

            “Here comes the Chief now,” said Rude.

            Troopers had run ahead to hold open the iron gates. Veld and Hojo led the way; Tseng walked at their heels, followed by Hojo’s technicians carrying two laden stretchers.  Mozo was with them, dragging what looked like Angeal’s sword.  The rest of the troopers brought up the rear.

            “What are you doing out here?” Hojo asked the Turks. “I told you to take the survivors into the mansion.”

            Rude began, “The monsters – “ but was cut off by Mink saying, “They don’t want to go in there, sir.  They think the mansion is haunted.”

            “What they think is of no importance,” said Hojo. “I need them for my experiments.”

            Mink’s face stiffened. “What?”

            “You’re not serious?” exclaimed Cavour.

            “These people have done nothing to Shinra,” Mink declared. “You can’t treat them like criminals.”

            Reno kept his eyes trained on their Commander. Veld’s expression was carefully neutral, and perhaps to the troopers and technicians it looked as if he was indifferent, as if this was just another job - but any of his Turks would have recognized the anger in those thin lips tightly pressed together, the disappointment in the almost imperceptible furrowing of his brows. His look demanded, _Why did you disobey me?_

            Professor Hojo did not trouble himself to give Mink a reply.  Flipping back the sheet that covered the body on the first stretcher, he leaned over, took hold of a tanned, heavily-muscled forearm and felt for the pulse at the wrist.  Then he nodded approvingly. “Impressive. I was sure he would die on the way down here.  Commander, could you shine your light on this specimen?”

            The beam of Veld’s torch illuminated a face blue-lipped from loss of blood. There was a scar like a four-pointed star on the left cheek. Hojo took a pencil from his pocket and pushed up one of the eyelids.  “I think he may come round soon.  Such resilience! Not really surprising, though, when I consider what short work he made of my finest samples only a few months ago. What a stroke of luck to get the ideal specimen – “

            Mozo could keep his mouth shut no longer. “It’s Zack! Mink! – Rude! – Cavs! – Reno! – Can’t you see? It’s Zack!”

            _Don’t listen, Reno. Look the other way._

             “And this one,” said Hojo, moving to the next stretcher. “How determined he is to live!  And you say he _threw_ Sephiroth into the reactor core? Is that right, Turk?” He directed the question at Mozo, while simultaneously twitching the sheet to uncover a shock of spikey blond hair.

            _Veev’s grunt! You weren’t expecting that. Looks like his luck’s run out at last. Still, he’s already lived longer than he had any right to expect –_

            “Imagine,” Hojo chuckled.  “A mere nobody, overpowering the great Sephiroth. Extraordinary. Before today I would have said ‘impossible’. I wonder what his secret is? What a marvelous world we live in, eh, Veld?  So much to discover.” He flipped the sheet back over the grunt’s face. “Come along then, let’s get started.”

            The technicians picked up the stretchers and began to move towards the front door of the mansion.

            “Commander!” cried Mozo. “Stop them! That’s Zack!”

            “It’s Zack,” Mink echoed.

            “Come along, Turks, to work, to work,” Hojo chivvied them.

            “It’s Zack!” Mozo repeated desperately, as if Veld did not know already; as if saying the name enough times would somehow make a difference.

            “Sir, why are you letting this happen?” cried Mink. “All these people…“

            Cavour said, “Commander, no – “

            Rude said, “This is too dirty….”

            _And you, Reno, you who are trying so hard to see nothing, to think nothing, to pretend that this isn’t happening and that you aren’t here… What you really think is that this is sod’s fucking law. Don’t you? It would have to be Zack Fair, of all people, to back you into this corner._

_            You’ve wished him dead often enough. So - you think he deserves this?_

_            If you put your hand on that stretcher and help carry him inside to what you know Hojo’s going to do to him – or if you just stand here and do nothing, if you look the other way – what does that make you? _

Commander Veld was trying to explain it to them: “What’s happened here today cannot be allowed to leak out. Sephiroth has always been the public face of Shinra. His image and the company’s reputation are identical in people’s minds.  It is our job to ensure that both those reputations remain intact.”

            “But sir,” said Tseng, “The town – “

            “It’ll be rebuilt. It’s been done before.”

            “But that’s not possible – “

            “Nothing is impossible. Do as you’re told, Tseng.”

            Reno, whose mind had been desperately ferreting about for a loophole, now spoke. “But Chief, it’ll look weird if all the townspeople disappear. Can’t have a town with no people - ”

            “That’s been taken care of.”

            Mozo, meanwhile, had grabbed hold of Zack’s stretcher with both hands and dug his heels in.  Hojo saw this and tutted. “You are being impertinent, Turk. Really, Veld, I would have thought that over the last thirty years you would have improved your training methods at least a little. I’d like to conclude this business as quickly as possible, the way we did the last time.”

            “Mozo, you’re out of order,” said Veld. “These people are a liability. We can’t leave any witnesses.”

            Mozo did not let go of the stretcher. “Then I’ll shoot them,” he said –

            _Too late, _thought Reno, _too late, too late – _

“- If you order me to. Quick and clean. I’ll do that. But I won’t let Zack be taken in there to be tortured by this – “ Mozo looked Hojo up and down, searching for the word – “Ghoul.”

            “There’s always a fool somewhere standing in the way of progress,” sighed Hojo.

            “I’ve given you an order, Mozo,” said Veld.

            “I won’t do it,” Mozo replied.

            Hojo waved an airy hand. “Commander, a thought has just occurred to me. It’s been quite a while since I had a Turk to work with. Another specimen, or six, would make a very welcome addition to my collection. Especially since you seem unable to do much with them. I’ve always thought that boy of yours, in particular, had some fascinating potentialities - ”

            “Don’t threaten me,” said Veld. His anger, which he had held back while talking to Mozo, was unleashed now.

            Hojo remained unruffled. “Then get your people under control, and stop impeding my work.”

            Somewhere in his consciousness Reno was dimly aware that he was holding his breath. His heart was pounding so violently that he could barely hear what the Commander and the Professor were saying.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tseng and Rude reaching inside their jackets. His own hand moved towards his mag-rod -

            “Let’s go,” said Hojo to the stretcher bearers.

            The two technicians tried to move forward. Mozo held fast. “Guys!” he cried. “Don’t let him do this!”

            All of them – Rude, Reno, Cavour, Tseng – looked at the Commander. Only Mink stirred her foot a step, as if about to join Mozo’s protest.

            “I haven’t got time for this,” said Hojo.

            He took a small pistol from the inside pocket of his lab coat and shot Mozo in the chest.

            Mozo fell on top of Zack; the two technicians, startled by the gun’s sudden report, let go of the stretcher. It thudded to the ground. Zack groaned.

            Uttering a cry that might have been Mozo’s name, Mink flung herself onto the grass beside him. With one hand she felt for the pulse in his neck; with the other she pressed down on his chest, trying to stem the rush of blood.

            Hojo looked round the ring of Turk guns aiming at his head, and smiled.  “So little like you, Veld, aren’t they?  Perhaps you need to explain to them exactly how these things are done.  After all, you are the one with the experience.”

            Mink had taken off her jacket and was pressing it down hard on Mozo’s wound. “Sir!” she called to Veld,  “He’s not dead. He’s alive - ”

            The other Turks held their weapons steady. “Just give the word, Commander,” said Tseng.

            “You’re right,” said Veld to Hojo. “They’re not like me.  Rude, Cavour, help Mink with Mozo. Reno, go ahead and start up the chopper. Tseng, look after them. Take everyone back to Midgar. Say nothing of this.”

            Disbelievingly, obediently, they lowered their guns.

            Hojo pointed at Mozo. “That specimen is mine – “

            “No,” Veld growled. “You can’t have him. I’ll stay. I’ll do this with you. But my team are finished here. Move!” he roared at them.

.

            Afterwards – long afterwards, years later, when they were finally able to talk about it - Reno said that when the Commander ordered them to move it felt like an autopilot switch had been flipped: his legs started running of their own accord. Rude said, I know what you mean, and Tseng said, we were well trained. He was the best, the Commander.

            But maybe they were just making excuses, re-writing the past.  The Commander had always insisted on shouldering any blame. If someone wanted to take a shot at a Turk, he’d make sure that they kept their heads down, while he put his own head above the parapet.  That was the way things ran in the office.  That was what the Commander was for.

            Reno’s lungs were bursting by the time he reached the helicopter. It was covered with a thick layer of ash. Inside, Hunter was still curled against the bulkhead. She’d gone to sleep. Lucky her. He slid into the pilot’s seat and started the engine.  A few minutes later the others materialized out of the drifting smoke. Rude and Cavour were carrying Mozo between them, while Mink maintained the pressure on his wound. Tseng bought up the rear.

            Reno went into the back of the helicopter, found some army blankets and spread them across the floor. Hunter woke up, rubbing her eyes. Gently they lifted Mozo inside. When Hunter saw the blood-soaked jacket on his chest, she began to scream.  “Be quiet,” said Tseng. But she couldn’t.  He hit her on the side of the head and knocked her out cold.  Then he went forward and took the seat next to Reno.

            “Go,” he said.

            The heavy machine leapt into the air and shot forward.

            The rhythm of the rotors had a language all its own, insistent, insidious. Earmuffs couldn’t block it out completely.  As the blades went round they whispered to Reno _youlefthimthereyoulefthimthereyoushityoushityoushit…_

Nobody spoke. The silent reproach of their consciences was deafening.

            Finally, Tseng had to say something. “It’s not his fault.  It’s my fault. I let this happen.”

            “What difference does it make now?” said Mink. “Can’t you fly any faster, Reno? He’s never going to make it to Midgar.”

            “We’ll put down in Corel,” said Tseng. “There’s a man there sells materia.”

            “Hang on, Mozo,” Cavour begged him.

            The helicopter chopped through the night sky, and Mozo did hang on, minute by minute, across the moon-silvered mountain ridges and across the valleys lost in shadow, until, as they were coming down to earth in a meadow just outside Corel, he died. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of all the chapters based directly on episodes from Before Crisis, this is the one that deviates furthest from the game's original script. In the game, no Turks die, and Veld experiences a hallucinatory flashback to the events surrounding the destruction of Kalm. In terms of the morality of what they do, the Nibelheim incident is a turning point for the playable Turks, but because the narrative is a game their struggles with their consciences are necessarily brief. For characters in a novel to behave in the same way would, I felt, have made them too superficial and unsympathetic.


End file.
